An Update from Robert M. Califf, MD (FDA Commissioner, 2016-17 & 2022-25) at #SCAI2025
📅 May 03, 2025SCAI-TV8 MIN158 VIEWS20 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Get a sneak peek at the #SCAI2025 keynote from Robert M. Califf, MD, former FDA Commissioner (2016–17 & 2022–25), as he sits down with Lyndon C. Box, MD, FSCAI, for a candid conversation on the state of American healthcare, the future of interventional cardiology, and the power of innovation. Dr. Califf shares his unique perspective as someone who has worked alongside interventional cardiologists throughout his career, directing cardiac care units and navigating the evolving healthcare landscape.
Questions asked in this interview
3
0:20Can you give us a little bit of a teaser of what you're going to be talking about?
2:28What advice would you give to a budding entrepreneur that's looking to bring a new device to market, as far as preparing for their interactions with the FDA?
5:00So maybe could you share how you see that impacting device development, or even just the development in healthcare as far as research and moving forward?
Hello, I'm Lyndon Box, and I have the honor of speaking today with Sky TV and Dr. Robert Califf, former FDA commissioner. Rob, thanks for coming and being kind enough to talk with us.
I guess you're our keynote speaker today, and everybody's really excited. Can you give us a little bit of a teaser of what you're going to be talking about?
Well, you know, this is a good challenge. I'm not an interventional cardiologist, but I've spent my whole career alongside interventional cardiologists directing coronary care units. So, what I plan to do is to first of all just point out that my career has been built on clinical trials and quality measures and taking care of patients before and after interventional procedures, and I've had the privilege of working with a lot of phenomenal people. It's an amazing field.
Secondly, I'm going to point out that in the midst of this amazing technology and talent that we have in interventional cardiology, it's happening in the midst of a failure of American healthcare. America is in last place right now among high-income countries in length of life and healthy lifespan. And I'm going to go through some of the factors related to that.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for us, cardiovascular disease is a big part of it, a very significant part of it. But it's not the interventional part of cardiology that's the issue. It's fundamental blocking and tackling risk factor management. And so people often ask me, as a former FDA commissioner, you know, where is technology going? And you know, my message there is I have no worries about the fancy technology of better and better micro quality in interventional cardiology making the procedures better and better. Where we really got to focus is using technology, artificial intelligence, digital health to get the right patient to the right place at the right time, because we have a tsunami of risk factors in our population that's going to keep interventional cardiologists busy for a long time. And we sort of got to go back now and say, how do we equip primary care people at home to take better care of themselves and then to get to the interventional cardiologists at the right time.
Well, now, as you alluded to, we're a very device-heavy field, and I think part of the allure for interventional cardiologists is getting a chance to work with such amazing technology. What advice would you give to a budding entrepreneur that's looking to bring a new device to market, as far as preparing for their interactions with the FDA?
7 more exchanges in this transcript
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Califf, R. (2025, May 3). An Update from Robert M. Califf, MD (FDA Commissioner, 2016-17 & 2022-25) at #SCAI2025 [Interview transcript]. SCAI-TV. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3075825/
MLA
Robert Califf. "An Update from Robert M. Califf, MD (FDA Commissioner, 2016-17 & 2022-25) at #SCAI2025." SCAI-TV, 3 May. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3075825/.
BibTeX
@misc{califf2025_3075825,
author = {Robert Califf},
title = {An Update from Robert M. Califf, MD (FDA Commissioner, 2016-17 \& 2022-25) at #SCAI2025},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, SCAI-TV. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3075825/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
