The Return of Dr. Kurt Amplatz

Soon after graduating from medical school in 1951, he discovered that he didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. “I worked for my father when he went on vacation, and I had to listen to all these complaints and stories,” Amplatz recalls. “You cannot separate psychosomatic disease from real disease—at least, for me it was very difficult. Also, you had to get up once or twice at night to make house calls. My father could do it, I couldn’t. So I went into academia where I was protected . . . . The advantage of interventional radiology is that you do not have to have contact with the patients.”

Amplatz came to the United States in 1952 for an internship in Brooklyn, followed by a residency in Detroit. In 1957, he joined the medical faculty at the University of Minnesota, which was doing pioneering work in open-heart surgery. During the next four decades, he turned down several offers to become a department chairman because he preferred to spend more time in his lab. “I would have made a lousy chairman,” he says. “I’m not an administrator.”

But the university lab wasn’t the only place he tinkered. In a neighbor’s garage in 1959, he built a machine to inject dye through catheters into children’s hearts for angiograms, x-ray examinations that rely on the injected dye to reveal defects in the heart. His prototype was made from an old nightstand and operated by a foot pedal. “To deliver enough contrast medium or dye, you would need a lot of pressure. So the physician would stand up on the pedal,” Amplatz explains. “The syringe was made of steel. Some friends at Honeywell machined it for me on the side. They weren’t supposed to, but they did. I remember I asked, ‘How much do I owe you?’ and they said $50, which was a shock to me. I was only making $5,000 a year or something like that.”

(During his recent hiatus from AGA Medical, Amplatz enrolled at Century College, a technical school in White Bear Lake, to learn to do his own machining.)

Other inventions followed, for procedures in neuroradiology and uroradiology. Some—including a device to help diagnose brain tumors and a technique for removing kidney stones through a patient’s back—have been replaced by newer technologies. Others are staples in hospitals around the world. The specially shaped Amplatz catheter, invented in the 1960s, is “still a mainstay for coronary angiography,” says Dr. Donald Hagler, a professor of pediatrics at the Mayo College of Medicine in Rochester. Amplatz Goose-Neck Snares, created in 1979, are used to retrieve broken catheters and other items from the cardiovascular system.

Amplatz fed many of his inventions to Minnesota start-up companies, helping to launch several in which he had no ownership stake. They include AngioMedics, acquired by Pfizer in the 1980s; SciMed Life Systems, acquired by Boston Scientific in 1995; and Microvena, maker of the Goose-Neck Snare, which became part of vascular device manufacturer ev3 a few years ago.

Amplatz and his son, Curtis, a chemist, made the first of what would be AGA Medical’s occlusion devices “for experimental purposes” in a machine shop they set up in a University Avenue warehouse. He remembers renting the space for $75 a month. When the occluders looked promising, “I wanted to take in more people, like a secretary and someone who would take care of the business—my son absolutely refused,” Amplatz says. “So I had no choice but to start a new company.”

All but $200 of the start-up money for AGA Medical came from Amplatz. He sold one-third shares in the new enterprise to two partners for $100 each.

“The company was an experiment,” Amplatz explains. “I wasn’t sure there would ever be a viable product. I was gambling with my own money, and I didn’t want the other two guys to gamble with theirs.”

One of his partners was his son-in-law, Franck Gougeon, a Frenchman who came to the United States in 1987; he worked in international sales and clinical affairs for Micro-vena. The other was Michael Afremov, originally from Russia, who was a Micro-vena engineer.