Speakers
Professor Borja Ibáñez
Borja Ibáñez, MD PhD combines research activities as Director of Clinical Research of the National Center for Cardiovascular Research in Spain with clinical activities as cardiologist at the University Hospital Fundación Jiménez Díaz. He was trained in Spain and in USA (Mount Sinai Heart, NY). His research is at the verge of basic and clinical arena, mainly in the fields of MI, heart failure, atherosclerosis and lately to cancer therapy-induced cardiotoxicity. He leads several studies in the field of primary and secondary prevention of atherosclerosis. Primary prevention studies aim at better identifying the risk of developing acute atherothrombotic events in asymptomatic subjects by imaging and other biomarkers means, while secondary prevention studies focus on better therapies to reduce subsequent events and to increase quality of life. He is an advanced imaging user, and has used magnetic resonance imaging to better understand pathophysiology of myocardial diseases (tissue characterization), to evaluate the benefits of cardioprotective therapies, and for improved risk stratification.
He is PI of several multicenter clinical trials recruiting patients with myocardial infarction, heart failure, and at risk for cancer therapy cardiotoxicity. He served as the Chairman of the 2017 European Society of Cardiology (ESC) STEMI Clinical Practice Guidelines. He is PI of several national and international projects, including several active H2020-funded grants, highlighting an active ERC consolidator grant devoted to the study of anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity. He has published more than 230 scientific publications in high-impact journals. Inventor of several patents, some in the field of CMR. He is involved in peer review activities (funding agencies and scientific journals).
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Professor Richard Johnson
Dr Richard Johnson have performed medical research since the early 1980s and have been funded by the NIH since 1987. Most of his research has focused on the pathogenesis of kidney diseases, but during the last 12 years his studies have also included studies of the pathogenesis of primary hypertension, insulin resistance and diabetes, diabetic nephropathy, and obesity. Much of his work has involved a combination of cell culture and animal models with a strong translational component, but he has also been involved in a number of clinical trials and epidemiology based studies. One of his major areas of research is on the pathogenesis of obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome, including the pathogenesis of fatty liver (nonalcoholic fatty liver disease) and chronic kidney disease. Much of this work has focused on the role of sugar (and particularly fructose) and its metabolite, uric acid. His work on fructose led to the discovery that the preference for alcohol and sugar are linked, and this has led to a recent UO1 focusing on the role of fructokinase in alcohol use disorder. As part of his work, he also discovered that there is a role for a related enzyme, AMP deaminase, in alcohol preference as well. He propose key experiments to validate AMPD2 as a target for potential therapy for alcohol use disorder.
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Professor Marco Metra
Marco Metra is Professor of Cardiology and Director of the Institute of Cardiology of the Department of Medical and Surgical Specialties, Radiological Sciences and Public Health of the University and Civil Hospitals of Brescia, Italy.
He is Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Heart Failure, the official journal of the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), Senior Consulting Editor of the European Heart Journal and member of the Editorial board of many other scientific journals. His research activity is focused on treatment of heart failure and its comorbidities. He has had a leading role in multiple trials of new therapies in patients with heart failure.
He is the ex-officio member of the board of HFA, a fellow of HFA, ESC, the Heart Failure Society of America, a member of the Italian Society of Cardiology (SIC) and many other scientific societies.
He is author of more than 600 articles in peer-reviewed journals with a current google scholar H index of 87.
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Professor Roberto Pecoits-Filho
Dr. Pecoits-Filho is a Senior Research Scientist at Arbor Research Collaborative for Health in Michigan, USA and a Professor of Medicine, Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil. As a clinician, he has broad activities in Internal Medicine and Nephrology based at the University affiliated hospitals, where he was the former Chief of the Department of Internal Medicine between 2010 and 2016, the Director of the Residency program in Nephrology from 2013 to 2016. Dr. Pecoits-Filho is the Principal Investigator for the study CKDOPPS, a multinational study on practice patterns and outcomes in advanced chronic kidney disease. He is a Scientific Leader for several clinical trials in nephrology with George Clinical.
Dr. Pecoits-Filho received his MD in 1993 and trained in Internal Medicine and Nephrology in Curitiba, Brazil before completing a nephrology fellowship at the University of Missouri, Columbia and receiving at PhD from the University of Sao Paulo. He was a visiting scholar for extended periods of time at the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) and the George Institute (Australia), and has participated as a principal investigator, regional leader and in steering committees in several multinational clinical trials. Dr. Pecoits-Filho served as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Nephrology (ISN) (2017-2019), the SONG Initiative (2017-present) and KDIGO (2016-2018).
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Dr John Malcolm Walker
Qualified in Medicine from the University of Birmingham with honours in pre-clinical medicine and obtained my MD in 1984. Clinical training in cardiology was at St Thomas’ Hospital London and Oxford. Appointed as Consultant Cardiologist and Physician at University College Hospital London (UCLH) in 1987. I have maintained a comprehensive clinical cardiology practice at UCLH, the Middlesex and the Heart Hospitals, encompassing adult cardiology and intervention, with periods as the Clinical Director and latterly, the Clinical Lead.
In 1990 He co-founded with Dr Derek Yellon, the Hatter Cardiovascular Institute (HCI), utilising donations from a grateful patient. The HCI has an international reputation in laboratory and translational research, focusing on myocardial protection, producing >600 publications and over 70 MD and PhDs.
He established a dedicated cardiology clinic for patients with disorders of haemoglobin. Out of this service arose a collaboration with the Brompton Hospital and led to the development of the MRI T2* for non-invasive iron measurement. Clinical use of T2* has been associated with a >70% reduction in cardiovascular mortality in Thalassaemia. He has written the chapters on cardiac management of thalassaemia for the UK National Standards Framework and for the International Guideline published by TIF. He was an expert contributor to the AHA consensus statement on thalassaemia, published in Circulation 2013 and still the standard reference article for the care of TM patients.
In recent years He have ceased cardiology interventional practice, to focus on research, particularly the cardiovascular complications of thalassaemia and the application of novel cardiac MRI sequences. Trials of rapid cMRI protocols have been completed in Thailand, India and Peru with planned further studies in Indonesia.
In 2016 He helped establish the Cardio-oncology service at UCLH. This is an expanding clinical service and research programme, serving cancer patients with cardiovascular complications. He has published over 120 articles in major scientific journals & has a Scopus H-index of 36.
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