Cardiovascular – “A Change of Heart: Reinventing Cardiovascular Care for the 21st Century”

(Part 1)	(Part 2)
(Part 3)	(Part 4)
(Part 5)	(Part 6)

This session will feature brief talks from a wide range of experts with a variety of research interests in cardiovascular disease.

Talk 1

Speaker: Paul Ridker, MD, Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular), BWH.

Title: “Taming inflammation”.

Talk 2

Speaker: Calum MacRae, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Dept. of Medicine (Cardiology), BWH

Title: “Personalized Disease Models/Next Generation Diagnostic Tools”

Talk 3

Speaker: Marc Sabatine, MD, Associate Professor, Dept. of Medicine (Cardiology), BWH.

Title: “Picking the Correct Drugs For Each Patient”

Talk 4

Speaker: Christine Seidman, MD, Thomas W. Smith Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular), BWH

Title: “Revolutionizing Medicine Through Genomics”

Talk 5

Speaker (s): Marc Pfeffer, MD, PhD, Victor J. Dzau Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular)

Title: “The Heart-Kidney Connection”

Talk 6

Speaker: Karen Joynt, MD, MPH, Instructor, Dept. of Medicine (Cardiology), BWH

Title: “Measuring Quality in Cardiology Care”

Talk 7

Speaker: Joseph Loscalzo, MD, PhD, Chair & Hersey Professor of the Theory & Practice of Medicine, Dept. of Medicine, BWH

Title: “Network Medicine: Putting It All Together”

Discussion Moderator: Ron Winslow, Deputy Editor, Health & Science, Wall Street Journal

Session Chairs:

Calum Macrae, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Dept. of Medicine (Cardiology), BWH

Paul Ridker, MD, Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular), BWH

 

Bios

Dr. Karen Joynt’s ongoing research projects are around understanding the unique challenges faced by minority-serving hospitals in trying to reduce readmission rates, understanding the patterns of care and spending for the highest-cost patients in Medicare and Medicaid, and public reporting and its impact on case selection for PCI.  She is currently developing a project to look at how ACOs impact cardiovascular care, outcomes, and costs. Dr. Joynt’s published work thus far includes exploring how readmissions for heart failure differ between hospitals, examining racial and ethnic disparities in readmissions, and investigating differences between high- and low-volume, urban and rural hospitals.

Dr. Marc Sabatine has led several large-scale, international, randomized controlled trials of novel antithrombotic pharmacotherapies.  He was a pioneer in the multimarker approach to risk stratification and has several NIH grants supporting the application of proteomics and metabolomics for discovery of novel biomarkers.  He has a long-standing interest in pharmacogenetics and has made seminal observations on the impact of genetic polymorphisms on the pharmacologic and clinical response to antiplatelet therapy. Dr. Sabatine has published extensively in these fields and has authored over 130 original research, peer-reviewed articles. He is the recipient of multiple honors and awards including the American College of Cardiology Zipes Distinguished Young Scientist Award and has been inducted into the American Society of Clinical Investigation.

Dr. Joseph Loscalzo’s lab is interested in the vascular biology of endothelial cells and platelets and their role in atherosclerosis and thrombosis.  In particular, the laboratory has focused much of its efforts in recent years on the biology and pathobiology of nitric oxide in the vasculature using molecular, genetic, biochemical, cellular, and animal approaches. These studies are relevant to the molecular pathogenesis of atherosclerosis, systemic hypertension, pulmonary hypertension, and thrombotic vascular disorders

Dr. Calum MacRae is a cardiologist, geneticist and developmental biologist. His research is focused on understanding the genetic contribution to common cardiovascular disease using human studies and complementary high-throughput biology in the zebrafish. His clinical interests include the management of inherited heart disease and cardiac involvement in systemic diseases.

Dr. Paul Ridker’s primary research brings together classical tools of large-scale, population based epidemiology with emerging genetic and molecular techniques designed to improve our ability to predict and prevent vascular disease. Particular areas of interest involve inflammatory mechanisms of heart disease and molecular and genetic determinants of hemostasis, thrombosis, and inflammation with a focus on “predictive medicine”, early disease diagnosis, and the underlying causes and prevention of acute coronary syndromes.

Dr. Marc Pfeffer‘s main interests are the pathophysiology of progressive cardiac dysfunction following myocardial infarction or hypertension and clinical management strategies for myocardial infarction and left ventricular dysfunction. He has been the lead investigator for a number of seminal cardiovascular drug clinical trials. He assists in the determination of the initial clinical applications to address, and the design of the animal studies and clinical trials to support drug development

Dr. Jorge Plutzky directs a NIH-funded basic science laboratory that investigates mechanisms contributing to the development of atherosclerosis in patients with various metabolic disorders, namely obesity, dyslipidemia, and diabetes. Dr. Plutzky’s expertise across both basic science and clinical issues relevant to cardiovascular disease and metabolic abnormalities is well recognized.

Dr. Christine (Kricket) Seidman uses genetic techniques to study the molecular basis of cardiovascular diseases. She is interested in dominant-acting mutations in sarcomere protein genes that cause hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in humans. Seidman’s lab is using Murine models (produced via embryonic stem cell technologies) to study how these gene mutations produce cardiac hypertrophy. A molecular genetic approach to the study of other human disorders is also ongoing at the Seidman lab.

Ron Winslow is deputy editor, health and science and a senior medical and health care writer for the Wall Street Journal. He has written more than 1,000 articles describing new medical and health care research and chronicling the economic forces transforming the nation’s health care system. He received the Howard Lewis Award for career achievement from the American Heart Association in 2003 and his work has been honored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other groups. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers, and was a founding board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists.