Dr. Braunwald is the Distinguished Hersey Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and chairman of the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) Study Group at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. He received his medical training at New York University, New York, and completed medical residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Braunwald served as the first chief of the cardiology branch and as clinical director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, and as founding chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. From 1972 – 1996, he was chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was a founding trustee and chief academic officer of Partners HealthCare System, Boston.
Dr. Braunwald’s first major paper was published in Circulation Research in 1954, and he has been a major force in cardiology over the past half century. His early work focused on the control of ventricular function and he was the first to measure both left ventricular ejection fraction and the change in left ventricular pressure over time (dP/dt) in patients. His group showed the first neurohumoral defect in human heart failure, defined the pathophysiology of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and demonstrated salvage of ischemic myocardium following coronary occlusion. The group also described both myocardial stunning and ventricular remodeling following myocardial infarction.
For the past 25 years, Dr. Braunwald has chaired the TIMI Study Group, and, with his colleagues, demonstrated improved patient survival with a patent coronary artery. He and his colleagues were the first to show the benefit of preventing adverse remodeling of the infarcted ventricle with angiotensin converting-enzyme inhibition. In 2004, the PROVE–IT–TIMI 22 trial demonstrated the benefit of more intensive reduction of low-density lipoprotein levels in high-risk coronary artery disease patients; this has already changed practice guidelines and will favorably affect the lives of millions.
Dr. Braunwald is an editor of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, and the founding editor of Heart Disease, now in its 8th edition, the most influential textbooks in their fields. Science Watch listed Dr. Braunwald as the most frequently cited author in cardiology. Based on his contributions, Dr. Braunwald has received many honors and awards including the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American College of Cardiology; Research Achievement and Herrick Awards of the American Heart Association; and the Gold Medal of the European Society of Cardiology. He is the recipient of 14 honorary degrees from distinguished universities throughout the world. The living Nobel Prize winners in medicine voted Dr. Braunwald as “the person who has contributed the most to cardiology in recent years.” He was the first cardiologist elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
Dr. Califf is vice chancellor for clinical research, director of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute (DTMI), and professor of medicine, Division of Cardiology, at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, United States. For 10 years he was director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), the largest academic research organization in the world, leading the DCRI for many clinical trials in cardiovascular disease. He graduated from Duke University summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and from Duke University Medical School, where he was selected for Alpha Omega Alpha. He served his internship and residency at the University of California, San Francisco, and his fellowship in cardiology at Duke.
Board-certified in internal medicine and cardiology, and a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, Dr. Califf has served on the Cardiovascular and Renal Drugs Advisory Committee of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Pharmaceutical Roundtable of the Institute of Medicine (IOM). He also served on the IOM committees that recommended Medicare coverage of clinical trials and banning ephedra, and he is currently serving on the IOM’s Committee on Identifying and Preventing Medication Errors as well as its Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation. He is the director of the coordinating center for the Centers for Education & Research on Therapeutics™ (CERTs), a public/private partnership among the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the FDA, academia, the medical-products industry, and consumer groups. This partnership focuses on research and education that will advance the best use of medical products.
With colleagues from the Duke Databank for Cardiovascular Disease, Dr. Califf has written extensively about the clinical and economic outcomes of chronic heart disease. He is considered an international leader in the fields of health outcomes, quality of care, and medical economics. He is the editor-in-chief of the American Heart Journal, the oldest cardiovascular specialty journal. The author or coauthor of more than 800 peer-reviewed journal articles, he is a contributing editor for www.theheart.org, an online information resource for academic and practicing cardiologists. He was recently acknowledged as one of the 10 most cited authors in the field of medicine by the Institute for Scientific Information.
Dr. Gibson is a full-time interventional cardiologist and chief of clinical research in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He received his bachelor’s, master’s, and medical degrees from the University of Chicago, Illinois. He was an intern, resident, and chief resident at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and received his training as an interventional cardiologist at Beth Israel Hospital where he served as director of the coronary care unit. He then served as the chief of cardiology and director of interventional cardiology at the West Roxbury Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and as an associate physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. After serving as vice chairman of medicine, clinical research, and director of invasive cardiology at Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was associate chief of cardiology, chief of interventional cardiology, and director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2000, Dr. Gibson returned to Harvard Medical School, serving until 2003 as chief academic officer and director of core services at Harvard Clinical Research Institute (HCRI) and, until 2005, as associate chief of cardiology and director of academic affairs in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was the director of the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) Data Coordinating Center at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital until 2009.
Dr. Gibson’s work has largely focused on investigating the pathophysiology of coronary artery disease and the efficacy of pharmacologic and device-based therapies. He is founder and chairman of the board of WikiDoc Foundation (a 509(a)(1) charitable organization), the world’s largest medical textbook / encyclopedia with over 25,000 page views daily of more than 75,000 chapters of content contributed by over 900 registered users.
In 2007, Dr. Gibson was selected by Who’s Who as Clinical Researcher of the Year. His work has been presented in over 1,000 manuscripts, abstracts, trial summaries, textbooks, and textbook chapters.
Dr. Mahaffey is an associate professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center and a faculty member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) in Durham, North Carolina, United States. In addition, he is a vice-chairman of the Duke Institutional Review Board. He received his medical degree from the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, in 1989, and was an intern, resident, and chief medical resident at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, Tucson. Dr. Mahaffey then completed a cardiology fellowship at Duke University.
His primary research focus is the design and conduct of multicenter clinical trails and analyses, using large patient databases, of important issues in clinical cardiology. Clinical research interests include the evaluation of new antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapies in the management of acute coronary syndrome (ACS), the study of agents to prevent reperfusion injury in acute myocardial infarction (MI), the analysis of cardiac enzyme elevations in patients with ACS, and the study of stroke and fibrinolysis-related intracranial hemorrhage. He has been the principal or co-principal investigator for the AMISTAD, ATBAT, CARDINAL, and SYNERGY trials. He was one of the leaders for the ROCKET and TRACER trials.
Dr. Mahaffey is also interested in the methodology of clinical trials. Current research activities include standardization of the definition of MI used in clinical trials and the adjudication of suspected clinical endpoint events in large multicenter studies. He has developed efficient strategies to classify clinical endpoints and is the director of the Clinical Events Classification (CEC) group at the DCRI. This group has been responsible for clinical event adjudication in many of the prominent trials in cardiology over the past decade.
Dr. Mahaffey is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, and a member of the American Heart Association’s Clinical Cardiology Council. He has authored or coauthored a number of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and editorials. He is a reviewer for several cardiology journals and is on the editorial board of Current Controlled Trials in Cardiovascular Medicine, and is an associate editor of the American Heart Journal.
Prof. Verheugt is professor of cardiology at the HeartLung Center of the University Medical Center of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and chairman of the Department of Cardiology, Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis, Amsterdam. He received his medical degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1974 and completed a thesis on platelet and granulo-cyte antigens and antibodies in 1977. He trained in cardiology at the Thoraxcenter of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. From 1981 – 1982, Prof. Verheugt was a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, United States. He also served as professor of cardiology at the Free University in Amsterdam (1989 – 1994).
His main fields of scientific interest are pharmacologic and interventional treatments of acute coronary syndrome. Prof. Verheugt is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the European Society of Cardiology, and the Council on Clinical Cardiology of the American Heart Association. He served as president of The Netherlands Society of Cardiology from 1999 – 2001.
Prof. Verheugt has published over 370 papers and has more than 10,000 citations in peer-reviewed international journals including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Circulation, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and the European Heart Journal. He sits on the editorial boards of the latter four journals as well as that of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, among others. He is an editorial adviser of The Lancet and Circulation.