Marco Diena

Dr. Marco Diena is the Head of the Department of Transcatheter and Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery at the Policlinico San Donato Clinical Research Institute in Milan.

He graduated with honors from the University of Turin in 1985 with a thesis on “Heterotopic Heart Transplant”, the experience of which he gained in Nice from the Professor Vincent Dor. The following year, he won a fellowship at the Policlinico San Matteo Clinical Institute in Pavia, which is the first organ transplant center in Italy. In 1988, he received his first experience at the Policlinico San Donato Clinical Institute, where he operated on adults and children as an assistant, under the guidance of doctors Alessandro Frigiola and Lorenzo Menicanti. Dr. Marco Diena is one of the leading surgeons of the Bambini Cardiopatici nel Mondo Association. In 1995, at the age of 35, he became the youngest chief cardiac surgeon in Italy in Turin. In 2001, he performed the first heart surgeries with the Da Vinci robot and became the first Italian to teach robotic surgery in the Master’s program for urologists and general surgeons. From 2002 to August 2019, he served as the Director of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at the San Gaudenzio Clinic in Novara. He is a consultant cardiac surgeon at the Cardiothoracic Center of Monaco.

He has performed more than 13,000 heart and great vessel operations, both in Italy and abroad, specializing in endoscopic and minimally invasive surgery, on which he made 12 presentations at the main international symposium on mitral valve surgery Mitral Conclave from 2011 to 2019. He taught specialized courses on mitral and aortic valve plastics with live broadcast of operations at the EuroEcho and EuroCardiology conferences in Vienna, Rome, Warsaw, Bucharest and Timisoara.

In 2017, he published his first book “Il cuore oltre il confine”, the proceeds of which went to finance the activities of the Cardioteam Foundation Onlus, which he heads, founded in 2008 to carry out prevention, education and research in the field of cardiovascular diseases.