Health Silk Road Expands: Prof. Fang Zhenfei from Xiangya Second Hospital Leads DragonFly™ TEER Academic Exchange in Turkey

As a strategic hub spanning Eurasia, Turkey is a shining pearl of the ancient Silk Road and a key node connecting East and West in today’s Belt and Road Initiative. Today, this millennia-old trade route is being imbued with new connotations of “health” and “academia.”

Recently, Valgen Medtech, in collaboration with Professor Fang Zhenfei’s team from the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, embarked on a four-day academic exchange journey in Turkey. From the bustling urban districts of Istanbul to the southern coastal city of Antalya, the Chinese delegation visited multiple leading local heart centers, conducting high-level promotion and dissemination of Chinese surgical techniques and Chinese-made medical devices.

This voyage represents a technological odyssey, another practice of the “Health Silk Road” in the cardiovascular field, and a powerful assertion of Chinese expertise in atrioventricular valve interventional therapy on the international stage.

This itinerary was compact yet highly productive. Over the course of four days, Chinese and Turkish experts collaborated closely. Professor Fang Zhenfei visited five core cardiac centers, including the Koşuyolu Yüksek İhtisas Eğitim ve Araştırma Hastanesi, Turkey’s national-level specialized cardiovascular research and teaching center, where he observed and provided guidance on five complex TEER procedures.

In the face of complex and variable anatomical structures, every step of the surgery is challenging. In a critical case involving a 96-year-old patient with extremely advanced age and complex anatomical morphology, Professor Fang Zhenfei and the local team repeatedly simulated and evaluated the degree of valve calcification, the leaflet capture range, and the clipping strategy. Relying on the stable and precise maneuverability of the DragonFly™ system, the team successfully completed the repair.

Another landmark case involved the first patient in Turkey to receive DragonFly™ therapy for mitral regurgitation. Due to the recent onset of tricuspid regurgitation, and given the excellent long-term efficacy and safety demonstrated by the previous procedure, the patient and the local medical team decisively opted for DragonFly™ again, successfully completing tricuspid valve repair.

As the centerpiece of this exchange, DragonFly™ resonated with experts from both China and Turkey thanks to its unique design philosophy, stability, and precision. Multiple Turkish experts stated that, compared with traditional devices, DragonFly™ demonstrated excellent reliability in real-world clinical practice, offered multidimensional solutions for managing complex anatomical structures, and held substantial clinical application value.

At Medipol Acıbadem District Hospital, one of Turkey’s leading teaching hospitals and most influential comprehensive medical academic centers, a face-to-face exchange with Prof. Dr. Ertuğrul Okuyan, the current President of the Turkish Society of Cardiology, and Prof. Dr. Omer GOKTEKİN, the former President, brought this academic journey to its climax. The two teams engaged in in-depth discussions on frontier hotspots in structural heart disease, particularly interventional therapies for atrioventricular valves.

Prof. Dr. Ertuğrul Okuyan’s focus is highly pragmatic: standards for anatomical assessment, perioperative management, and the compatibility of devices with diverse pathological structures.

In response to the technical issues raised by the Turkish side, Professor Fang Zhenfei provided highly insightful answers, drawing on his decades of expertise in structural heart disease and his extensive experience performing over 1,000 cardiac interventional procedures annually. As one of the leading figures in this field in China, Professor Fang not only shared large-scale clinical experience from China during the exchange but also engaged in candid discussions with Turkish experts on the management logic for complex cases.

This purely case- and data-driven dialogue exemplifies the highest level of academic mutual learning.

Four days are short—so brief that there is hardly time to savor the sunset over the Bosphorus Strait; yet they are also long—long enough to build an academic bridge between two ancient civilizations.

During this visit to Turkey, Valgen Medtech established a long-lasting bond of clinical trust in the core Eurasian market. This trust is built upon in-depth dialogues between the Chinese team led by Professor Fang Zhenfei and top Turkish operators, and further reinforced by the consistent performance of DragonFly™ in every surgical procedure.

At this moment, a seed of China’s TEER technology has been sown; with its roots firmly planted in clinical practice and academia, it is destined to “soar like a dragon.”Looking ahead, Valgen Medtech will continue to seize this opportunity to collaborate with global clinical experts in jointly advancing the TEER procedure and promoting the long-term development of the industry, thereby extending the benefits of Chinese innovation to patients worldwide.