International Circulation: You will be speaking at CIT 2011 on the CTO-1 Chronic Total Occlusion trial; can you give a brief introduction to some of the aims of the trial and what you have learned from this trial?
　　Prof. Strauss: I have been working on this project for about ten years and it is a new approach to try to assist interventional cardiologists to open chronic total occlusions. As you are probably aware， these are very difficult set of blockages to treat and they have a very low success rate when treated by interventional cardiologists. This low success rate is usually because the guidewire cannot make its way through the occluded artery.
　　What I have been working on is a new way to attempt to change the characteristics of the blockage so that it is softer and we can penetrate it with even softer guidewires than we usually use with it and to try to keep these guidewires where they should be in the artery and to get through the CTO.
　　International Circulation: There are many Japanese experts focused on treating CTO. Have you cooperated with any Japanese experts in this research?
　　Prof. Strauss: There are many experts here at the CIT meeting， not only from Japan， but also from China. I first presented this work at the U.S CTO club when it was first formed and I have been presenting it regularly as the work has been progressing. However， this particular trial was only conducted in Toronto， Canada at two different sites there. This is the beginning of the work on this and it is getting close to the stage where we can start to spread out and involve other centers but all the work to date has been done in Canada.
　　International Circulation: Are there any plans to include Chinese investigators in the research?
　　Prof. Strauss: In the next study we are going to try to extend the number of operators that are using it and it will probably be in U.S and Canadian centers but there may also be some European centers. I am certainly open to the idea of working in China or Japan but it is going to be for sure a little closer to home for the next work that we will be doing.
　　International Circulation: Other than your own research， is there any particularly promising or interesting work in the area of CTO or in interventional cardiology in general?
　　Prof. Strauss: For the last several years my focus has been on CTO. Of course， the Japanese have pioneered a number of techniques， particularly retrograde techniques， and a lot of the wires and catheters that we use are based on the work that comes out of Japan. In fact， I have used some of that Japanese equipment in my own research to try to inject collagenase into the chronic total occlusions using some catheters and guide wires that were originally developed there. I think it is quite unique and innovative work because it is unusual to try and change the characteristics of the occlusion and that is the unique work that we are doing. I don’t think that I have yet seen anything similar to that although there some interesting devices that are being looked at.