LIVE - GCOS 2021 - Virtual Day One

Dr. Alexander Lyon is a Senior Lecturer in Cardiology at Imperial College London and a Consultant Cardiologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital. His clinical interests are in the field of heart failure, cardio-oncology including chemotherapy cardiomyopathy and the cardiovascular complications of modern cancer therapies, Takotsubo syndrome and the effects of major stresses of the heart, and the development of novel therapeutics including gene therapy for chronic heart failure. Alex has published over 180 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, several book chapters in cardiology textbooks including the chapter on cardiotoxicity of tyrosine kinase inhibitors in the latest edition of the ESC Textbook of Cardiology. He is a deputy editor of the European Heart Journal, an associate editor of the European Journal of Heart Failure, international advisor to the journal JACC Cardio-Oncology and his H-index is 44. Alex is the clinical lead for the Cardio-Oncology service at the Royal Brompton Hospital since 2011, specialising in surveillance and cardioprotection from modern cancer drugs, risk stratification and treatment of all cardiac complications of cancer treatment. Alex is the current president of the British Cardio-Oncology Society, recently appointed a board member of International Cardio-Oncology Society (ICOS - 2021), chair-elect European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Council of Cardio-Oncology (2020-2022) and he is the cardiology advisor to the charity Macmillan Cancer. Alex is a co-investigator of the first Leducq Cardio-Oncology Transatlantic Research Network funded from 2020-2025 ($6M). Alex is a co-chair of the first ESC Cardio-Oncology Guideline which will be published in 2022. Alex completed a full 4 year term on the board of the Heart Failure Association of the ESC (2016-2020), and he initiated and was the chair of the Heart Failure Association Cardio-Oncology Study Group. He is a co-author of the ESC Position Statement on Cardio-Oncology, the ESC Cardio-Oncology Council article on the setting up and delivery of Cardio-Oncology services and the 2020 ESMO guidelines on the management of cardiac diseases in cancer patients. He is a member of the International Cardio-Oncology Society and Alex was co-chair of the 2017 Global Cardio-Oncology Summit which hosted 325 specialists from 33 countries at the Royal College of Physicians in London in September 2017.

Ana Barac, MD PhD is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Oncology at Georgetown University and the director of the MedStar Heart and Vascular Institute's Cardio-Oncology program. She specializes in advanced cardiovascular imaging and cardiovascular care of oncology patients. Dr Barac serves an Associate Editor of JACC Cardio-Oncology and a co-director of the ACC Live Course on Advancing CV Care of Oncology patient. She was the founding Chair of the American College of Cardiology (ACC) Cardio-Oncology Council.

Dr. Anne Blaes is an Associate Professor in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Minnesota. She is the section head of Medical Oncology within this division and is Director of Cancer Survivorship Services and Translational Research within the Masonic Cancer Center. She is an active medical oncologist with a special interest in the late effects of cancer therapy, particularly in the area of cardio-oncology. Her research focuses on designing and implementing strategies to help prevent the long term complications of treatments in our cancer survivors, particularly in the areas of cardiovascular health. She is the Chair for the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s Cancer Survivorship Committee, a member of the Executive Board for the Global Cardiooncology Society, associate editor for JACC Cardio-oncology, section editor for Hem/Onc Today on Survivorship and an active member of the ALLIANCE for Cancer Clinical Trials.

Dr. Daniela Cardinale is specialized in Cardiology. She holds a PhD in Cardiovascular Physiopathology in 2009. She is currently Director of the Cardioncology Unit of the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. Her professional experience and investigational interests focus on prevention, early detection, monitoring and treatment of cardiotoxicity; screening of cardiotoxicity in patients with cardiac disease; malignant pericardial effusion evaluation and intrapericardial treatment.

Dr. Dinesh Thavendiranathan is a cardiologist at the Peter Munk Cardiac Center at the Toronto General Hospital, University of Toronto. He is an Associate Professor of medicine and a Clinician Scientist. Dr. Thavendiranathan’s Clinical work involves cardiac MRI, CT, and echocardiography and Cardio-oncology. He is the Director of the Ted Rogers Program in Cardiotoxicity Prevention. His research focus is in the use of advanced cardiac imaging techniques for detection and management of cardiac toxicity. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Cardio-oncology.

He is a cardiologist and myocyte biologist. his clinical focus is cardio-oncology (the cardiovascular care of cancer patients and cancer survivors). His basic and translational NIH-funded laboratory addresses myocardial responses to various stresses including hypoxia, aging and toxins. Over the last several years, given his clinical interest in cardio-oncology, his laboratory focus has been in delineating the mechanistic underpinnings of cardiovascular toxicities from novel targeted cancer therapies. He believes because of the targeted nature of the toxicities, cardio-oncology can provide insights into novel signalling pathways that are relevant in human cardiovascular biology and pathology. At Vanderbilt, He is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Director of Cardio-Oncology and Co-director of Vanderbilt Program for Optimizing Immuno-oNcology Therapy (V-POINT). He works closely with cardiologists and oncologists, basic, translational researchers and clinicians locally, nationally and internationally. He has also started several collaborations with industry and regulatory bodies (including the US FDA). He was recently named the first chair of the American Heart Association (AHA) cardio-oncology subcommittee. At Vanderbilt, he has established a Graduate Medical Education (GME) approved fellowship training the next generation of physician-scientists in the field of cardio-oncology. He is an elected member of American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI).

Dr. Joerg Herrmann graduated from Ruhr University medical school in Bochum, Germany and completed his internal medicine residency and cardiovascular diseases and interventional cardiology fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Thereafter, he joined the division of cardiovascular diseases at the Mayo Clinic Rochester. He is a Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and currently serves as the director of the Cardio-Oncology Clinic and the research director of the Ischemic Heart Disease program. His research interests focus on all aspects of cardio-oncology and the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and treatment of atherosclerosis. He has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has received NIH grant funding. He also serves as the associated editor of Trends in Cardiovascular Medicine and Practice Update.

Joseph R. Carver, MD, FACC is a Board Certified cardiologist. He is the Founding Editor of the American Journal of Managed Care and was a Senior Corporate Medical Director at Aetna U.S. Healthcare from 1992-2001 where he was responsible for new program development and directed the National Medical Excellence Program. From 1999-2001, he was Co-chairperson of the New Jersey and Michigan Working Groups that established voluntary agreements among the insurers in those states to cover the routine costs of clinical trial participation for cancer patients. He is one of the Founding Editors of Cardio-oncology Journal. He currently is the Bernard Fishman Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania, the Chief Operating Officer of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania and the Chief of Staff of the Abramson Cancer Center. He is the Director of the Thalheimer Cardio-oncology Center at the Abramson Cancer Center and his clinical practice is in the subspecialty of Cardio-oncology. He was the recipient of the IS Ravdin Master Clinician Award at Penn in 2012 and is one of the founding members of Penn Medicine’s Academy of Master Clinicians. He received the Thomas Force Award in 2020.

Dr Scherrer-Crosbie is the Director of the Echocardiography Laboratory and a Professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, USA. She has a longstanding interest in the interactions of cancer, chemotherapy and heart failure. Throughout her research career, she has also successfully developed a number of novel techniques in the field of echocardiography. She has published over 145 papers and has been continuously funded by the American Heart Association, the American Society of Echocardiography and the NIH. She is involved in the ACC, AHA, APS and ASE, having chaired the cardiovascular sessions at Experimental Biology 2016-2019 and the American Society of Echocardiography 2019 Scientific Sessions. Over the last several years, she has been the PI of 2 multicenter prospective studies, one investigating the value of echocardiographic and blood biomarkers in the prediction of cardiotoxicity in women treated with anthracyclines and trastuzumab, and one investigating the role of statins in the prevention of cardiotoxicity.

Dr Raul Cordoba is Head of the Lymphoma Unit at the Fundacion Jimenez Diaz University Hospital, Madrid, Spain. He obtained his Bachelor of Medicine degree from the Autonomous University of Madrid and went on to specialise in haematology at the University Hospital La Princesa, Madrid. He first started his research in the field of lymphoid neoplasms, achieving his Master’s degree in Molecular Oncology from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, Madrid, and his PhD from the Department of Medicine at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is also the Principal Investigator for the Haematology Programme of START Madrid-FJD, a unit dedicated exclusively to Phase I trials in oncology. He serves as the vice-president of the Spanish Group of Geriatric Hematology of the Spanish Society of Hematology and Hemotherapy (SEHH) since 2012. He is the chair of the EHA-Scientific Working Group "Aging and Hematology"" of the European Hematology Association (EHA) since 2019. Since 2014, Dr Cordoba is the National Representative of the International Society of Geriatric Oncology (SIOG) in Spain and member of the Board of Directors since 2020. He is member of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) and American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) where he has given lectures in scientific symposia and educational programs with the topic of geriatric hematology.

Ronald Witteles, MD is Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In addition to leading the CardioOncology program at Stanford, Dr. Witteles serves as Co-Director of both the Stanford Amyloid Center and the Stanford Multidisicplinary Sarcoidosis Program, and is an Associate Editor for JACC: CardioOncology. He has served as Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency Training Program at Stanford for over a decade, and in this role directly supverises the training of >140 residents each year.

Teresa López-Fernández is a clinical investigator and consultant cardiologist at La Paz University Hospital in Madrid, Spain. She is specializes in cardiac imaging (she is board certified in advanced and transesophageal echocardiography by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC)) and cardio-oncology (she is board certified by the International Cardio-Oncology Society), and currently coordinates the cardio-oncology team at La Paz University Hospital. She is the founder and chair of the Spanish Cardio-Oncology Working Group at the Spanish Society of Cardiology (SEC) and the Secretary of the ESC Council of Cardio-Oncology.

Tom Marwick is the Director of Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. His education was completed at the University of Melbourne, University of Louvain, Belgium and Harvard. His main contributions are in clinical research and research training, and has supervised over 30 research higher-degree students. He was one of the initiators of stress echocardiography, and has made contributions to the prognostic evidence underlying cardiovascular imaging. His main research interests relate to detection of early cardiovascular disease and cost-effective application of cardiac imaging techniques for treatment. He has published over 900 papers, reviews, chapters and editorials, and is an Associate Editor at JACC and Deputy Editor at JACC-Cardiovascular Imaging.

Dr. Neilan is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Clinical Director of the Cardio-Oncology Program at MGH, the co-Director of the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center, and the PI of the MGH T32 Training Program in Cardiovascular Imaging. He is a physician scientist and a board-certified cardiologist. He completed his medical school training at University College Dublin Medical School, his clinical training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the Mater Hospital in Dublin and repeated his training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at MGH. He has also competed advanced training in Echocardiography at MGH, a three-year Cardiac MRI clinical and research fellowship at BWH and a Master’s in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. His career has had two major focuses: 1) Understanding how we can improve the cardiovascular care of patients with cancer and 2) The use of advanced imaging to better understand and characterize cardiovascular disease. In summary, so far in his career, he has authored or co-authored more than 120 original manuscripts and 30 review articles, presented over 100 abstracts at international meetings, has lectured at major national and international meetings, and received funding from the American Heart Association, American Society of Echocardiography, The National Institutes of Health, MGH Institute for Heart, Vascular and Stroke Care, The Irish Heart Foundation, the Center for AIDS Research and Industry. Dr. Neilan has been awarded the “de Gunzburg Family Endowed Scholar in Cardiology”, The Locke Award for excellence in medical education and elected as a Senior Fellow to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Society, a mentorship program, at Harvard Medical School.