Session 3 - Year in Review: Key Developments in Cardio-Oncology

Alicia Morgans, MD, MPH is a Genitourinary Medical Oncologist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Faculty in Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. She completed medical school at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and completed residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She then completed fellowship in hematology/oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute/Massachusetts General combined program before working as faculty at Vanderbilt University, where she earned a Masters of Public Health, and at Northwestern University. She is now serving as the Medical Director of the Survivorship Program at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, where she specializes in investigating complications of systemic therapy for prostate cancer survivors, including the study of cardiovascular, diabetic, skeletal, and cognitive complications of prostate cancer survivorship. As a current member of the cardio-oncology committee of American Heart Association, she has contributed to the recent AHA Scientific Statement in Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, entitled Impact of Hormonal Therapies for Treatment of Hormone-Dependent Cancers (Breast and Prostate) on the Cardiovascular System: Effects and Modifications, and she continues to be an active member of this group. She also acts has a leadership role in several ECOG and NRG trials, all of which include investigations of the complications of hormonal therapy in men with prostate cancer.

Dr. Leong is Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, McMaster University. His clinical interests include cardio-oncology, frailty, multi-morbidity and echocardiography. He is Director of the McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences Cardio-Oncology Program. Dr. Leong completed his cardiology training, Doctor of Philosophy, Master of Public Health, and Master of Biostatistics degrees at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has completed a post-doctorate fellowship in cardiovascular imaging at the Leiden University Medical Centre, the Netherlands, before re-locating to Canada. He is currently a Clinician Scientist of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. His research is supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Cancer Society, and he has published over 150 manuscripts including all the leading internal medical and cardiovascular journals. His h-index is 47 with approximately 11,000 citations.

Evandro de Azambuja, MD, PhD, is the Head of the Medical Support Team (Academic Promoting Team) located at the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium. Dr. de Azambuja earned his first PhD from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, in May 2007 and his second PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B) in December 2015. His principal interest in oncology is breast cancer, especially in the adjuvant/neoadjuvant settings. He is deeply involved in the conduct of large phase III trials in breast cancer (some of them practice changing in breast cancer) such as HERA (adjuvant trastuzumab), ALTTO (trastuzumab and/or lapatinib), APHINITY (trastuzumab with or without pertuzumab), Alexandra (adjuvant atezolizumab in triple negative breast cancer) and – in the neoadjuvant setting - the LORELEI trial which tested the efficacy of PI3K inhibition in combination with endocrine therapy. He is also greatly engaged in studies concerning cancer toxicity of new drugs in oncology as well as in long-term follow-up of patients enrolled in clinical trials with focus in cardiotoxicity. Within the latter context, he was a co-author of guidelines on treatment-related cardiac toxicity by the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). He was past chair of the survivorship of the Belgian Society of Medical Oncology (BSMO). Dr. de Azambuja was a member of the ESMO Executive Board (2018), and currently is an ESMO Council Member (since 2019) and the Chair of the ESMO Fellowship Committee (mandate started in January 2018). He was a member of the ESMO Young Oncologists Committee (YOC) and the ESMO Press & Media Affairs Committee. He is also a faculty member of the ESMO Leaders Generation Program launched in 2016-2017 and Co-Chair of this Programme since 2018. He was appointed as the Chair of the ESMO Leadership Generation Task Force in January 2019. He was appointed as a Breast Faculty Member of ESMO in 2017 and was a Board Member of the Belgian Society of Medical Oncology (BSMO) 2015-2019. Dr. de Azambuja is also a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the Belgian Society of Medical Oncology (BSMO). He is actively involved in editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), “ESMO Open – Cancer Horizons”, and ESMO Perspectives. He has (co)-authored about 240 peer-reviewed articles and 15 book chapters. He has been a member of Education and Scientific Committees of the ESMO, ESMO Breast, EBCC and ECCO meetings.

Dr. Giselle C. Meléndez is an MD-scientist at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston Salem, NC. Through basic science, translational, and clinical studies, Dr. Meléndez is deeply committed to improving the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of cardiac complications of cancer therapies and identifying novel interventions to prevent and treat cardiotoxicity in cancer survivors. Specifically, her research focuses on the contribution of extracellular matrix remodeling, inflammation, and cardiac fibrosis to the development of left ventricular dysfunction. She serves as an investigator in clinical trials employing cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging to evaluate subclinical cardiac tissue characteristics; she has adapted these clinical CMR techniques to her pre-clinical rodent and non-human primate models cardiotoxicity to enhance the translatability of her research. Additionally, Dr. Meléndez serves as a peer reviewer of numerous prestigious journals, she is a standing member of the National Institute of Health (NIH), Therapeutic Development and Preclinical Studies study section and she is currently funded by grants from the NIH.

Joseph C. Wu, MD, PhD is Director of Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and Simon H. Stertzer, MD, Professor of Medicine and Radiology at Stanford University. Dr. Wu received his MD from Yale University and PhD (Molecular & Medical Pharmacology) at UCLA. He is board certified in cardiology. His lab works on cardiovascular genomics and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The main goals are to (i) understand basic disease mechanisms, (ii) accelerate drug discovery and screening, (iii) develop “clinical trial in a dish” concept, and (iv) implement precision medicine for patients. Dr. Wu has published >400 manuscripts with H-index of 106 on Google scholar. He is listed as top 1% of highly cited researchers by Web of Science (2018, 2019, 2020). Dr. Wu has received NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, NIH Roadmap Transformative Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) given out by President Obama at the White House, American Heart Association (AHA) Distinguished Scientist Award, and Burroughs Wellcome Foundation Innovation in Regulatory Science Award. He serves on the FDA Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee. Dr. Wu is an elected member of Association of University Cardiologists (AUC), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Association of Physicians (AAP), and National Academy of Medicine (NAM).