hhs2021

Speakers

 

Professor Rachel Batterham Professor Rachel Batterham

Professor Rachel Batterham is Professor of Obesity, Diabetes and Endocrinology at University College London (UCL). She leads the University College London Hospital (UCLH) Bariatric Centre for Weight Management & Metabolic Surgery and the UCL Centre for Obesity Research within the Department of Medicine. She is the Clinical Director for the Division of Medicine at UCL and the Director for the UCLH/UCL NIHR Biomedical Research Centre Obesity Research Theme. She is the Royal College of Physicians’ Special Advisor on Obesity.

She has received several national and international awards for her obesity including the Royal Society of Medicine’s Steven’s Lecture (2018), the Andre Mayer award from the World Obesity Federation (2016), and the Diabetes UK Rank Fund Nutrition Prize (2015).

Professor Batterham has made significant clinical contributions to defining the management of obese patients through her membership of the NICE Obesity Guideline Development Group. She is Scientific Chair for the International Federation for Surgery for Obesity and Metabolic Diseases (IFSO) European Chapter (since 2015), a Trustee for the Association for the Study of Obesity (since 2016) and Council Member for British Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society (since 2016). She is passionate about reducing the stigma that people with obesity experience and ensuring that the patient voice is heard and has established a charity for people affected by obesity, Obesity Empowerment Network UK

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Professor Morris Brown Professor Morris Brown

Professor Morris Brown, FMedSci, was the Foundation Professor of Clinical Pharmacology in the University of Cambridge, and is now Professor of Endocrine Hypertension at Barts and the London School of Medicine. He was President of the British Hypertension Society 2005-2007 and led the British Heart Foundation-funded PATHWAY programme of three trials in patients with hypertension, published in Lancet and Lancet Diabetes Endocrinology. His current interest is the discovery and translation of molecular mechanisms in Primary Aldosteronism, leading to non- (or minimally) invasive techniques – PET CT, endoscopic ablation – for the cure of hypertension. He was awarded the Lilly Gold Medal of the British Pharmacological Society (2002), the Walter Somerville Medal of the British Cardiac Society (2006). His introduction of the AB/CD rule, and innovations in management of phaeochromocytoma and Conn's syndrome, led to the Hospital Doctors' Award in 2003, and RCP/Lancet award in 2016, and International Society of Hypertension's Robert Tigerstedt Lifetime Achievement award in 2018.

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Dr Daniel Drucker Dr Daniel Drucker

Dr. Dan Drucker received his M.D. from the University of Toronto in 1980, and is currently Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He the Banting and Best Diabetes Centre-Novo Nordisk Chair in Incretin Biology. His laboratory is based in the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mt. Sinai Hospital and studies the molecular biology and physiology of the glucagon-like peptides. Dr. Drucker has been elected to Fellowship in the Royal Society, London and to the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

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Dr Hertzel Gerstein Dr Hertzel C. Gerstein

Dr. Hertzel C. Gerstein is a Professor at McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences, where he holds the Population Health Research Institute Chair in Diabetes and is the Director of the Diabetes Care and Research Program and Deputy Director of the Population Health Research Institute.

Dr. Gerstein’s research has been published in over 400 papers, spans 50 countries, and has been funded by both peer-reviewed and industry grants. It focuses on: a) prevention and treating diabetes and its consequences; b) dysglycemia (a term he coined in 1995) and cardiovascular outcomes, cognitive impairment, other diabetes-related consequences, and new diabetes; c) type 2 diabetes remission; d) novel biomarkers; and e) the biologic basis of glucose-related health consequences. In 2016 he produced and distributed a music video to mitigate the impact of diabetes on affected people and their families. In 2012 he received the Canadian Diabetes Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Professor Nikolaus Marx Professor Nikolaus Marx

Professor Nikolaus Marx, born in 1968, is Professor of Medicine / Cardiology and Head of the Department of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Aachen, Germany. He received his medical training at the Universities of Mainz, Genf (Switzerland) and Düsseldorf, obtaining his MD in 1994. His thesis on growth regulation in human renal cancer cell lines was completed at the laboratory of Professor Gerharz at the Institute of Pathology, University of Mainz. After a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Peter Libby and Dr. Jorge Plutzky at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Nikolaus Marx later became a board-certified internist, then cardiologist, before specialising in intensive care medicine in internal medicine at the University of Ulm. He was appointed Professor of Medicine / Cardiology and Head of the Department of Internal Medicine I at the University of Aachen in 2009.

Professor Marx is a member of several organisations within the field of cardiology and diabetes, including the European Society of Cardiology, American Heart Association (AHA), German Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. In addition to reviewing submitted manuscript to numerous journals, including Circulation, Diabetologia, Diabetes, Diabetes Care, the Journal of Immunology and The Lancet, he is currently Associate Editor for Diabetes and Vascular Disease Research. Professor Marx was awarded the Servier Young Investigators Award in 1999 at the First European Meeting on Vascular Biology and Medicine, more recently was winner of the Poster Award Competition in Epidemiological Science at AHA 2002, the 2004 Morgagni Young Investigator Award as well as the Rising Star Award 2005 of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD). Professor Marx has served as President of the German Atherosclerosis Society (DGAF) from 2012 to 2015. He has been a board member of the German Society of Cardiology (DGK) from 05/2017 to 04/2019.

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Professor Steven E. Nissen Professor Steven E. Nissen

Professor Steven E. Nissen MD is Chief Academic Officer for the Heart and Vascular Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, the Lewis and Patricia Dickey Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine and Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. From 2006 to 2019, he served as Chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. In 2006-2007 he served as President of the American College of Cardiology (ACC).

His initial research focused on application of intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging to the assessment of progression and regression of coronary atherosclerosis, conducting more than a dozen randomized controlled trials, most published in the NEJM or JAMA. More recently, he has served as Study Chairman for large global cardiovascular outcomes trials, most studying lipid modifying therapies. His contributions to scientific literature include approximately 600 journal articles and 60 book chapters. He is Editor-in-Chief of Current Cardiology Report, a journal that provides in-depth review articles on the most significant developments on the diagnosis, management, and prevention of cardiovascular diseases. He is co-author of a book for patients with heart disease, Heart411 released by Crown Books.

Dr. Nissen works closely with pharmaceutical companies on the development of new therapies for cardiovascular disease, but maintains a longstanding policy of requiring companies to donate all related honoraria directly to charity so that he receives neither income, nor a tax deduction.

He has also written extensively on the subject of drug safety. In 2001, he co-authored the first manuscript (JAMA) that raised concerns about the cardiovascular safety of rofecoxib (Vioxx™), which was withdrawn from the market 3 years later. In 2007, he authored a NEJM manuscript that demonstrated that the widely used diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia™) raised the risk of myocardial infarction, eventually leading in 2010 to withdrawal of the drug in Europe and severe restrictions in the US.

Dr. Nissen served as a member of the CardioRenal Advisory Panel of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for 5 years, and Chairman the final year of his membership. He continues to serve as Advisor to several FDA committees as a “Special Government Employee”. In July 2008, while serving as guest member of the Endocrine and Metabolism Advisory Panel, he recommended a new approach for approval of diabetes drugs, which was ultimately adopted by the Agency in December 2008.

Dr. Nissen is also known for his role in public policy discussions, particularly in the area of drug safety. He has testified in both the Senate (Health Education and Labor Committee) and House of Representatives (Energy and Commerce Committee) on FDA policy. He was actively involved in discussions with Congress on the FDA Amendments Act of 2007 that added additional regulatory authority for the Agency, including the requirement to register clinical trials and report results.

In 2007, Time Magazine selected Dr. Nissen as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Beginning in 2015, he was named by Thompson-Reuters as one of the world’s most highly cited physician-scientists.

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Professor Kausik Kumar Ray Professor Kausik Kumar Ray

Professor Kausik Ray is currently Professor of Public Health, Deputy Director of Imperial Clinical Trials Unit and Head of Commercial Trials within the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, Consultant Cardiologist and Chief Clinical Officer and Head of Trials – Discover Now as well as NIHR ARC National Lead of Cardiovascular Disease. Professor Ray received his medical education (MB ChB, 1991) at the University of Birmingham Medical School, his MD (2004) at the University of Sheffield, a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and finally an MPhil in epidemiology (2007) from the University of Cambridge.

A Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the European Society of Cardiology, the American Heart Association and the Royal College of Physicians, Kausik Ray is also a member of the British Cardiovascular Society and President of the European Atherosclerosis Society, also serving on the EAS Consensus panel and EAS Executive Committee. Professor Ray has either been the National Lead Investigator, Principal Investigator, or served on committees for several major medical trials, as well as international registries and is currently involved in 8 ongoing trials in lipids and diabetes and the PI for ORION 1, 3, 11 assessing PCSK9 inhibition through RNA interference and BETONMACE assessing BET protein inhibition in patients with ACS.

Professor Ray’s research interests have focused on the prevention of coronary disease with a focus on lipids, diabetes, biomarkers and risk prediction. He has an H index of 87, an i10 of 220 and over 92,000 citations for his work in journals such as New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, European Heart Journal, Circulation and JACC. He has also been included in the Clarivate Analytics’ list of the top 1% most cited authors in all of global medicine in 2018, 2019 and 2020. Key original contributions which have influenced European and American guidelines include demonstrating the early benefits of statin therapy post ACS, the impact of more/less intensive glycaemic control on CVD and the risks/benefits of aspirin therapy in primary prevention. Recently, his work on statins and diabetes risk led to a global label change for statins by the FDA and EMEA. Currently Professor Ray leads the EAS FH Studies collaboration which is the first global registry of FH which includes 70 countries and 62,000 cases, as well as being the Senior PI for the TOGETHER study looking at cardiometabolic risk in the vascular health checks in 250,000 people in London.

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Professor Christoph Wanner Professor Christoph Wanner

Professor Christoph Wanner is Professor of Medicine and head of the Division of Nephrology at the University Hospital of Würzburg, Germany

His research in the field of diabetic kidney disease, lipid disorders, and rare kidney diseases has been published in more than 800 pubmed referenced scientific papers and articles (HI 89). He has been PI of the 4D study and steering committee member of the SHARP and REVEAL trials. He is also steering committee member of the EMPA-REG Outcome, the EMPEROR & the EMPA-KIDNEY studies as well as the CARMELINA trial aiming in slowing the progression of kidney disease and improving cardiovascular outcomes.

He is member of several editorial boards of kidney journals and has been Associate Editor of the Clinical Journal of the America Society of Nephrology as well as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Renal Nutrition until recently.

In 2012 he received a doctor honoris causa from the Charles University of Prague. He has received the 2016 Award from the ERA-EDTA for Outstanding Clinical Contributions to Nephrology and in 2018 the Franz Volhard medaille, the highest award from the German Society of Nephrology. Dr. Wanner is President of the ERA-EDTA, being in office June 2020-2023.

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