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Consultant Chemical Pathologist
Professor of Cardiovascular Biomarkers
St. George's University of London, St. George’s Healthcare NHS Trust
Paul Studied at St Catharines College, Cambridge (Medicine and Biochemistry) and St Thomas Hospital, London.
Despite an eclectic career path, he was appointed a Consultant initially in Croydon and currently at St George’s Hospital, London. His doctoral thesis was on the early diagnosis of AMI with subsequent work on the pathogenesis, diagnosis and management of acute coronary syndromes. A special interest is in the cost economics of cardiac care and point of care testing. He has performed two prospective RCT’s on point of care testing, one of which was the first RCT in cardiac diagnostics. He introduced and developed cardiac troponin and B type natriuretic testing in the UK and has provided expert advice to the UK National Institute for Health Excellence (NICE) guideline groups for Chest Pain, Chronic and Acute Heart failure. Both cardiac troponin and B type natriuretic peptide measurement are endorsed by NICE. He was worked with National and International cardiac biomarker groups for EFLM and IFCC and worked on National and International audits of cardiac biomarker testing. He was awarded a personal chair as Professor of Cardiovascular Biomarkers in recognition of his achievements in this field.
He was part of the team that won the first award of the EFCC Labs are Vital award for Excellence in Outcomes Research in Laboratory Medicine and was recognized as one of the top 100 UK Scientists by the UK Science Council for his work as a Developer/Translational Scientist.
Paul has published over 220 papers and review articles, over 240 abstracts and 15 book chapters. Likes SCUBA diving and photographing sharks. Especially the ones with big teeth.
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Associate Professor
Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, McMaster University
Dr. Kavsak is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine at McMaster University, Clinical Biochemist and Quality Lead, Clinical Chemistry Discipline within the Hamilton Regional Laboratory Medicine Program, and Scientist at the Escarpment Cancer Research Institute, Hamilton Health Sciences.
Dr. Kavsak has made significant contributions in the area of cardiovascular biomarkers, in particular cardiac troponin. His publications were one of the first to demonstrate a shorter time interval and concentration change (absolute and relative) to measure cardiac troponin in the emergency setting, the impact of utilizing the 99th percentile cutoff for diagnosis and prognosis, the ability of low cardiac troponin concentrations to identify patients at long-term risk for cardiovascular events, and the early analytical and clinical characterization of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin assays. He has also explored and evaluated cardiac troponin as well as several other biomarkers to aid in cardiovascular disease risk assessment in various hospital settings and services (e.g., emergency, surgical and cancer etc.).
He is a certified clinical biochemist and fellow of both the Canadian and American Academy of Clinical Biochemistry and a recipient of numerous awards, most notably the American Association for Clinical Chemistry Outstanding Scientific Achievements by a Young Investigator and the Canadian Society of Clinical Chemists Research Excellence Award. In January 2012, he assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief for Clinical Biochemistry.
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CEO of Integrated Biobank of Luxembourg
Dr. Catherine Larue began her career as group leader at Sanofi, Montpellier, France, in the cardiovascular Research and Development (R&D) department. She then joined Sanofi Diagnostics Pasteur Inc., Minnesota, US, where she led the immunology department for three years, focusing on assay development and instrumentation. After that, she returned to Paris, France, as a Director of R&D for Sanofi, and then spent eleven years within the Bio-Rad group, where she occupied various management positions, ranging from leading a R&D department to the management of a Business Unit. She participated in the discovery of several innovative biomarkers (mostly cardiac markers) and in the market launch of dozens of diagnostic products. At Genfit, she led the biomarkers branch (strategy and discovery) in order to answer personalised medicine needs within a translational approach. Nowadays Dr. Larue is the CEO of Integrated Biobank of Luxembourg - IBBL (39 people supervised).
Dr. Catherine Larue is an author of 85 publications and she has filed 13 patents. She also served in standardization committees of cardiac markers at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) and the International Federation for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC). She holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Biology (Rouen University), a University degree in Clinical Cancer Biology (Paris VI University), and an Executive MBA (St. John’s University, New York).
Has occupied several management positions in R&D as well as business development in various companies such as Sanofi, Bio-Rad and Genfit
Participated in the discovery of several innovative biomarkers (mostly cardiac markers) and in the market launch of dozens of diagnostic products
Dr. Catherine Larue is an author of 85 publications and she has filed 13 patents
She has served in standardization committees of cardiac markers at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) and the International Federation for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC).
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Director, Samuel A. Levine Cardiac Intensive Care Unit
Director, TIMI Biomarker Program and Senior Investigator, TIMI Study Group,
Cardiovascular Division, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. David A. Morrow is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the director of the Samuel A. Levine Cardiac Intensive Care Unit in the division of cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Morrow earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and a Masters in Public Health with a concentration in clinical study design and interpretation from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Morrow is a senior investigator in the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction Study Group at Brigham and Women's Hospital with a research focus in the management of unstable and stable coronary artery disease, and he directs the TIMI Biomarker Program. He has been the principal investigator for 5 multicenter cardiovascular trials that have incorporated the study of cardiovascular biomarkers.
He is an internationally recognized expert in risk stratification in patients with ischemic heart disease. He has served on the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry (NACB) Laboratory Medicine Practice Guidelines Committee on Biochemical Cardiac Markers for which he led the clinical section on acute coronary syndromes. He is a member of the Global Task Force for a Universal Definition of Myocardial Infarction and of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Guidelines Committee for Management of ST-elevation Myocardial Infarction. He sits on the editorial boards of the American Heart Journal, Circulation, Clinical Chemistry, and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. He has been the recipient of the Lerner Young Investigator Award, the William W. Parmley Young Author Achievement Award, and the Eugene Braunwald Teaching Award.
Dr. Morrow has >180 publications in his areas of expertise, and is the editor of Cardiovascular Biomarkers, a text on biomarkers in Cardiovascular disease.
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Director of Emergency Medicine research, Christchurch Hospital
Health Research Council of New Zealand – Clinical Practitioner Research Fellow in Acute Cardiovascular Disease in the Emergency Department
Martin is an Emergency Medicine Specialist and Director of Emergency Medicine Research at Christchurch Hospital. He is also a Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Christchurch School of Medicine, University of Otago and is the current Chairperson of the Emergency Care Foundation – New Zealand’s only charitable trust dedicated to raising funds for Emergency Medicine research.
Martin received his medical degree from Imperial College London, and has done additional training in Evidence Based Healthcare at the University of Exeter, UK.
Martin’s specific areas of interest and expertise are evidence-based medicine and translating the findings of biomarker research into clinical practice. Dr. Than was the principle investigator of the 3500 patient ‘ASPECT’ study (involving 14 centers and 9 countries in the Asia-Pacific region including China) that was published in The Lancet (2011). He has previously directed a centre for medical evidence reviews in Christchurch and now acts as an expert clinical advisor to the regional ethics committee. He was the inaugural winner of the prestigious Beaven Medal for excellence in translational health research (2010) from the New Zealand Health Research Council and he is also a member of the Council’s College of Experts. He is a member of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC) expert project on "Education in Cardiovascular Biomarkers" which aims to produce educational materials for clinicians and laboratorians in the clinical practice.
Martin led a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) demonstrating the benefit of using accelerated measurement of cardiac biomarkers in patients being assessed for possible cardiac chest pain (JAMA Int Med 2014). This work on accelerated pathways has recently been incorporated into national service delivery standards requiring implementation in all New Zealand hospitals. Martin is the national clinical leader for this national implementation process which also aims to facilitate further research into the use of cardiac biomarkers in the assessment of patients with possible myocardial infarction. Martin is also leading a further RCT of new accelerated assessment pathway.
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Professor at Experimental Cardiology, University Medical Center Utrecht
Gerard Pasterkamp, MD, PhD, is a Professor and head of the Experimental Cardiology Laboratory at the UMCU. In addition to being a medical doctor, he has a degree in clinical epidemiology. He serves on many national and international academic boards and institutes. Gerard has a strong scientific track record in the field of arterial remodelling. In 2002 he envisioned the strategic power of a large scale atherosclerotic biobank (the Athero-Express) containing plaque and plasma samples and associated long-term follow up data. In this biobank new plaque derived biomarkers have been discovered and just recently they published a paper (Circulation) showing that the atherosclerotic disease phenotype is rapidly changing which will have a strong impact on the biomarker field.
Gerard Pasterkamp has done several original research observations in the field of vascular biology that, at that time, were considered counterintuitive.
Gerard Pasterkamp is also one of the founders and the Chief Scientific Officer of the Cavadis, a Dutch biomedical company. Cavadis is active in the field of cardiovascular risk assessment and focuses on the discovery and validation of cardiovascular biomarkers. Currently they are in the final validation stage of an exosomal based biomarker in a EU based consortium. The last 5 years he has been coordinating a governmental sponsored private public consortium with the objective to discover new biomarkers in circulating cells. The coming years his group will focus on gender specific biomarkers for cardiovascular disease and the role of genetics in females who suffer from diastolic heart failure. www.queen-of-hearts.eu.
Professor Pasterkamp is the author of 397 publications and has filed many patents.
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Head Central Diagnostic Laboratory and
Member of the Executive Board
Maastricht University Medical Center (MUMC+)
Marja van Dieijen-Visser is a member of the executive board of Maastricht University Medical Center (MUMC) since January 2014. She studied chemistry with mathematics at Leiden University and earned her PhD in 1981 from Maastricht University on the topic ‘Behaviour of tissue enzymes in the circulation’.
Van Dieijen- Visser has been employed by MUMC since 1993 as Professor and Department Head of Clinical Chemistry. This department was merged with the Central Diagnostic Laboratory, which she headed from early 2011 until January 2014.
Her expertise in the area of research focuses on cardiac biomarkers. Her research involves both heart damage in patients with acute coronary syndrome, as well as the study of heart damage caused by extreme exertion. She has published more than 170 peer-reviewed articles, three books, several book contributions, and has supervised 15 PhD students. Four PhD students are now under her supervision.
Van Dieijen-Visser is a member of the international EFLM working group on cardiac markers and also holds various managerial and supervisory positions.
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Professor
Department of Medical Sciences
Uppsala, Sweden
Per Venge is an MD and PhD and was appointed professor and chair of Clinical Chemistry at the University of Uppsala, Sweden in 1990. He has 540 original publications registered in the PubMed database and he has written several book chapters.
The interest of Per Venge for the diagnosis and monitoring of cardiac disease was initiated in the late 1970s when he and his research group developed a sensitive radioimmunoassay for the measurement of myoglobin in blood and urine. His group examined in more than 20 papers basic conditions and requirements for the measurements of myoglobin in the early diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction such as impact of renal function and skeletal muscle disease. Eventually his interest turned towards the diagnostic utility of cardiac troponins with the publication of another 70 papers. Most of these papers were published in high ranked journals such as New England Journal of Medicine, Circulation, Clinical Chemistry, American College of Cardiology, American Heart journal and showed the diagnostic and predictive value of cardiac troponins in the acute coronary syndrome.
Two important aspects of cardiac troponin assays were originally identified by Per Venge. One was the impact of the increased sensitivity of cardiac troponin assays for the early diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction and for the prediction of major adverse cardiac events. The importance of developing cardiac troponin assays with increased sensitivity was proposed in a series of publications from the early years of the century and prompted the development of the current high-sensitive troponin assays. The second important aspect was the identification of the importance of the antibody configuration of the cardiac troponin I assays for the identification of patients with increased risk of premature death or major adverse cardiac events. He showed that analytical and clinical sensitivities did not always go hand in hand and that any assay of cardiac troponin I should be evaluated from its capacity to identify patients at risk and not only from its analytical performance.
Another 35 papers have been devoted to the examination of the clinical utility of novel biomarkers and combinations of new and established biomarkers of cardio-vascular disease. The assay of one of these biomarkers, prolylcarboxypeptidase (Angiotensinase C), was originally developed by Per Venge and his research group and showed to be closely associated to signs of vascular atherosclerosis, obesity and diabetes.
Per Venge is currently examining large community-based cohorts and the possibility to use the high-sensitive cardiac troponin assays in primary intervention of cardio-vascular disease.
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