Monday, December 7th: 6:30 – 9:00 pm
Biological markers are increasingly accepted by the medical community as one of the major tools to help phenotype patients. Biomarkers can be used to aid in the diagnosis, assess outcomes, and to enrich population that may benefit from certain therapies. The future of biomarkers is even more promising. Technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning will increase the number and utility of our biomarkers. For many target therapies, biomarkers will become a mandatory companion to select patients that will benefit.
This session will be chaired by Dr. Kirkwood Adams, an active clinical researcher of congestive heart failure from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA, and Prof. Alexandre Mebazaa, Chairman of the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, at Hôpitaux Universitaires Saint-Louis & Lariboisière Hospitals, in Paris, France.
This session will look at the use of biomarkers beyond clinical trials. There have been rapid developments in data science, particularly around electronic healthcare records. The BigData@Heart Consortium is jointly funded by the EU and industry to address key unmet needs in CV data science, such as strategies to standardize the use of coding schemes for outcomes in clinical research. Other important European registries include the EUROHEART and ESC EURObservational Research Programme Registries.
There are opportunities to use biomarkers to help understand molecular mechanisms of diseases, to detect chronic conditions early, and to perhaps, slow or prevent their development. The HOMAGE (Heart OMics in AGEing) project, coordinated by INSERM in France, is being launched specifically for this purpose; to find specific biomarkers of HF that could be used to prevent its development. Prof. Faiez Zannad (Nancy, FRA), the project coordinator, will update us on this project which will use an innovative ‘omic-based’ approach to simultaneously investigate a large number of genes, proteins, and metabolites. Dr. Daniel Levy (Boston, USA), director of the NHLBI’s Framingham Heart Study since 1994, will update us on findings of the SABRe CVD Initiative (Systems Approach to Biomarker Research in Cardiovascular Disease) which has been researching new biomarkers of disease risk.
Other speakers on the panel include Tom Lumbers (London, GBR), and Lars Wallentin (Stockholm, SWE). Marc Walton, formerly of the US FDA, and now with Janssen, USA will discuss issues around regulatory approval and reimbursement of novel biomarkers. Representatives of industry including, Anna Lotta Schiller from Olink Proteomics (SWE), and Andre Ziegler from Roche Diagnostics (CHE) will describe progress in bio-analytical methods.
Although it is one of the final moderated multi-stakeholder debates, it will be among one of the most forward-thinking sessions. Join our speakers and the expanded panel to explore innovations in biomarker research.