Roche

Key Dates

April 2011
Registration open

Early December 2011
Call for Late Breaking Abstracts

31 January 2012
Early Bird Registration Deadline

17 February 2012
Author registration deadline

25 - 29 March 2012
Symposium dates

Hosted By

The Australian Atherosclerosis Society

ISA2012 Plenary Speakers

The following Invited Speakers will be presenting at ISA2012:

Professor Jane Armitage - Oxford University, UK

Jane Armitage is Professor of Clinical Trials and Epidemiology and Honorary Consultant in Public Health Medicine at the University of Oxford. She joined the Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) in 1990 from a background in clinical medicine, with particular experience in respiratory medicine, geriatrics and diabetes. She co-ordinates a series of large-scale clinical trials including the MRC/BHF Heart Protection Study, SEARCH and HPS2-THRIVE, which are trials of lipid modification in people with or at risk of vascular disease, as well as the ASCEND trial of aspirin and fish oils in diabetes. Her main research interests are in lipids and cardiovascular epidemiology.

Dr Jean-Pierre Després - Université Laval, Quebec, Canada

Dr. Després is Professor at the Division of Kinesiology of the Department of Social and reventive Medicine at Université Laval, Québec, Canada. Dr. Després received his PhD in exercise physiolog from Université Laval in 1984. He then pursued a post-doctoral training at the Department of Medicine of the University of Toronto from 1984 to 1986. Dr. Després has published more than 526 papers in peer-reviewed journals and has written over 55 book chapters. Dr. Després’ expertise covers the assessment and management of obesity and body fat distribution, lipid metabolism, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, exercise, nutrition and the prevention and the treatment of CHD risk factors. He has received numerous prestigious awards including the New Investigator Award from the American College of Sports Medicine and the Young Scientist Award from the Canadian Diabetes Association. In 1999, he received the Harold N. Segall Award of Merit from the Canadian Cardiovascular Society, the John Sutton Memorial Award from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology, the Simon Pierre Noël Speaker of the Canadian Lipoprotein Conference and the Eli Lilly Career Award from the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. Dr. Després is currently a fellow of the American Heart Association.

Professor Göran K Hansson - Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden

Professor Göran K Hansson is Professor of Cardiovascular Research at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and works at its Center for Molecular Medicine. He is Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, Director of the Medical Nobel Institute, and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Dr Hansson´s research deals with immune and inflammatory mechanisms in atherosclerosis. He has discovered that the atherosclerotic plaque is the site of an inflammatory/immune response involving activated T cells and their cytokines. His work has shown that low-density lipoprotein (LDL) elicits a cellular immune response, and that humoral immunity contains atheroprotective activity.

Professor John Kastelein - Amsterdam Medical Centre, The Netherlands

Dr. Kastelein is president of the Dutch Atherosclerosis Society (DAS) and chairs the National Scientific Committee on Familial Hypercholesterolemia (EHC). He also is a member of the Royal Dutch Society for Medicine & Physics, the Council for Basic Science of the American Heart Association and the European Atherosclerosis Society. He also is a boardmember of the International Task Force for CHD Prevention and was recently appointed to the Executive Board of the International Atherosclerosis Society (IAS). Professor Kastelein was also one of the founders of Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics Inc. (AMT), a gene therapy company based on the concept of gene replacement in hereditary lipoprotein disorders. AMT has recently (summer 2007) enjoyed a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO) at EuroNext in Amsterdam. The results of the first successful human gene therapy trial were widely publicized in the media and are published in ATVB in 2008. He has directed 36 postdoctoral theses and currently, he heads a team of 6 internists, 6 postdoctoral fellows, 26 MD PhD students, and a large number of laboratory technicians and clinical trial / study coordinators.

Dr Sekar Kathiresan - Broad Institute, Boston, USA

Dr. Kathiresan is the current Director of Preventive Cardiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Heart Center and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. He received his B.A. in history summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1997. Dr. Kathiresan completed his clinical training in internal medicine and cardiology at MGH. He served as Chief Resident in Internal Medicine at MGH in 2002-2003. Dr. Kathiresan pursued research training in cardiovascular genetics through a combined experience at the Framingham Heart Study and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In 2008, he joined the research faculties of the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center and the MGH Center for Human Genetic Research. His research laboratory focuses on understanding the inherited basis for blood lipids and myocardial infarction and using these insights to improve preventive cardiac care. In the past three years, Dr. Kathiresan has discovered many new genes related to heart attack risk and blood lipid levels and published these findings in leading biomedical research journals including Nature, Science, Nature Genetics, and the New England Journal of Medicine. In tandem with his research, Dr. Kathiresan’s clinical focus is the primary prevention of myocardial infarction in individuals with a family history of heart attack.

Professor Peter Libby - Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, USA

Peter Libby, MD, is the Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He also serves as the Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His current major research focus is the role of inflammation in vascular diseases such as atherosclerosis. Dr. Libby has received numerous awards and recognitions for his research accomplishments, most recently the Lucian Award for Research in Cardiovascular Disease (2009) and the International Okamoto Award (2010). His areas of clinical expertise include general and preventive cardiology. An author and lecturer on cardiovascular medicine and atherosclerosis, Dr. Libby has published extensively in medical journals including Circulation, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature. He is one of the Editors of Braunwald’s Heart Disease, having served as the Editor-in Chief of the 8th Edition. Dr. Libby has also contributed chapters on the pathogenesis, treatment, and prevention of atherosclerosis to Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. He has held numerous visiting professorships and has been selected to deliver more than 70 named or keynote lectures throughout the world. Dr. Libby earned his medical degree at the University of California, San Diego, and completed his training in internal medicine and cardiology at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital). He also holds an honorary MA degree from Harvard University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Lille, France.

Professor Ruth McPherson - University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Canada

Dr. Ruth McPherson received her PhD from the University of London (UK) and MD and subspecialty training at the University of Toronto. She directs the Lipid Clinic and Atherogenomics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. Her laboratory research is directed towards achieving a comprehensive and integrated understanding of the genetic and molecular etiology of two complex phenotypes, obesity and coronary artery disease by simultaneous application of a number of methodologies including rigorous clinical and metabolic phenotying, genome-wide association studies, resequencing, gene expression, and functional assays. Dr. McPherson has also been active in clinical guideline development for cardiovascular disease prevention.

Professor Alan Tall - Columbia University, USA

Alan Tall is the Tilden-Weger-Bieler Professor of Medicine, head of the Division of Molecular Medicine and director of the Cardiovascular Research Initiative of Columbia University. His major work has been on the regulation and metabolism of plasma high density lipoproteins (HDL). He discovered mutations in the cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) gene that are associated with reduced LDL and increased HDL levels, leading to the development of CETP inhibitors. Recently, Dr Tall has done research on the ATP binding cassette transporters ABCA1 and ABCG1 that promote cholesterol efflux from macrophage foam cells and hematopoietic stem cells to apoA-1 and HDL.

Professor Iichiro Shimomura - Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

Dr. Shimomura is currently Professor and Chairman, Department of Metabolic Medicine, Internal Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University. Under the supervision of Dr. Yuji Matsuzawa, he discovered the adipose tissue as endocrine organ and conceptualized such adipose derived factors as adipocytokines. He has shown the significance of PAI-1 in visceral fat obesity and leptin in lipoatrophic diabetes. He and colleagues discovered adiponectin from human fat cDNA in 1996 and have shown the importance of hypoadiponectinemia in metabolic syndrome and chronic organ diseases. Recently, his group newly analyzed the pattern of visceral and subcutaneous fat accumulation in large scale general Japanese populations.

Professor Christian Weber – Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany

Professor Christian Weber is Director of the Institute for Cardiovascular Prevention and the Chair in Vascular Medicine at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich, Germany, since 2010. After graduating and completing his training in internal medicine at LMU and Harvard Medical School, Boston, he was board-certified in clinical cardiology and appointed as a Chair in Molecular Cardiology at RWTH Aachen University. As a VICI laureate, he is also Professor and head of the Centre for Atherosclerosis Research at Maastricht University. His group has a strong interest in molecular interactions and pathophysiological functions of chemokines and immune cell subsets in vascular disease, while his clinical interests are focused on novel biomarkers. He is an ERC Advanced Investigator with >280 publications, Editor-in-Chief of Thrombosis & Haemostasis and co-founder of Carolus Therapeutics.

Professor Marja-Riitta Taskinen - Helsinki University, Finland

Professor Marja-Riitta Taskinen, MD,PhD is an internist and expert in lipid metabolism with a long record in the field. Her laboratory has made important contributions to understand the dynamics of lipid metabolism in fasting and fed states and the links with ectopic fat depots in humans utilizing stable isotope methods and MRI imaging. Her group was the first to report that liver fat is the driving force for VLDL production in human. Currently she leads her research team at Biomedicum Helsinki focusing on lipoprotein kinetics.

Professor Erik Latz - Medical Faculty, University of Bonn, Germany

The Latz Lab has a longstanding interest in deciphering the molecular mechanisms of innate immune receptor activation. In particular, the lab is interested in understanding how innate receptors interact with their ligands and how this molecular interaction leads to receptor activation. Recently, we have also focused on the molecular details of the mechanisms that lead to the activation of the NLRP3 and AIM2 inflammasome. The NLRP3 inflammasome can respond to a broad range of cellular stressors and to substances that indicate metabolic derangements such as aggregated peptides, crystals of monosodium urate (forming in gout) or crystals of cholesterol that are found in atherosclerotic plaques. One goal of the research is to translate the molecular understanding of innate immune receptor activation into the generation of molecular tools that could lead to the development of specific diagnostics for inflammatory materials. Another goal is to devise means to pharmacologically interfere with the activation of innate immune receptors in order to develop novel approaches to treat inflammatory diseases such as Alzheimer's disease or atherosclerosis.

Other confirmed speakers include:

Professor. John Danesh - University of Cambridge, London, UK
Professor Frank Hu – Harvard University, USA
Dr Ziad Mallat - Paris Cardiovascular Research, France

ISA 2012