Kanika Kalra, MD, Emory cardiothoracic surgery fellow, was recognized at the American Heart Association's 2020 Scientific Sessions with the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesia (CVSA) Resident Prize.
Each year, the CVSA selects four-to-six trainees or early career faculty as finalists for the award based on the quality of abstracts they submitted to the Scientific Sessions. The prize winner is chosen following the finalists' presentations at the conference.
Specifically, the prize acknowledged Dr. Kalra for the excellence of her abstract "Papillary Muscle Tip Approximation in Repair of Ischemic Mitral Regurgitation in a Chronic Swine Model," which was based on research she performed at the Structural Heart Research and Innovation Laboratory in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery. The lab is directed by Muralidhar Padala, PhD.
In the abstract, Dr. Kalra compared the efficacy of the current gold standard annular repair for correcting ischemic mitral regurgitation to a newer sub-annular repair. The study found that papillary muscle approximation, the latter method, allowed for more durable correction of the heart valve lesion and significant improvement in cardiac function than that of the traditional repair.
An ongoing clinical trial at Emory is studying this technique in patients, and a transcatheter technology to perform this repair using image guided, closed chest approaches is in development in the laboratory.
This is the latest in a series of awards received by Dr. Kalra. In January 2020, she received the Society of Thoracic Surgeons/European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery Best Resident Abstract Presentation Award at the 56th STS Annual Meeting, and in 2017, when she was an Emory general surgery resident, she was awarded both the David Campbell Resident Scholarship from the Eastern Cardiothoracic Surgical Society and the Carpenter Scholarship from Women in Thoracic Surgery.