Marco Metra is Full Professor of Cardiology and Director of the Institute of Cardiology of the Civil Hospital and University of Brescia, Italy, and Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Heart Failure and Senior Consulting Editor of the European Heart Journal.

Prof Metra has been principal investigator and member of the Executive or Steering Committees of many trials in patients with heart failure. His research is focused on heart failure with, as main areas of interest, β-blocker therapy and, more recently, the assessment and treatment of the patients with acute heart failure.

He has co-chaired with Prof. Teerlink, San Francisco, CA, the phase IIB Pre-RELAX-AHF and the phase III RELAX-AHF randomized placebo controlled trials in patients with acute heart failure and is chairing the current RELAX-AHF-2 trial, which has as primary end-points the effects of serelaxin on the 180-days mortality and on in-hospital worsening heart…

Dr Victoria Delgado is a board-certified cardiologist specialising in cardiovascular imaging and currently based in Leiden, the Netherlands. She works at Leiden University Medical Center, where she combines clinical practice with academic research and teaching. Over the past decade, she has become internationally recognised for her contributions to cardiovascular imaging and heart failure research.

Academic History

Dr Delgado completed her medical training and cardiology specialisation with a strong focus on cardiovascular imaging. She pursued advanced training in multimodality cardiac imaging, developing expertise across echocardiography, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging and cardiac computed tomography.

She is currently an Assistant Professor of Cardiology at Leiden University Medical Center, where she is actively involved in mentoring medical students, residents and fellows, while leading research initiatives in cardiac imaging…

Prof Nicole Karam is an associate professor in the Department of Cardiology at the European Hospital Georges Pompidou. She specializes in interventional cardiology and performs both coronary and valvular percutaneous surgeries, as well as research in Cardiovascular Epidemiology at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research.

After starting her medical studies at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut, she moved to Paris in 2010 and specialized in Interventional Cardiology. Subsequently, she trained in a highly specialized center for valvular heart disease in Munich, Germany, where she learned new techniques in percutaneous valvular interventions that she later brought back to Georges Pompidou Hospital.

Prof Karam is an active member and a fellow of the European Society of Cardiology, and a member of the steering committee of the Women’s European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions. 

Dr Makoto Amaki is the Chief Physician in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Division of Heart Failure at the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center, Osaka, JP.

His clinical expertise includes heart failure management and advanced interventional procedures, with a particular focus on MitraClip therapies.

Dr Amaki is a Fellow of the Japanese Society of Internal Medicine and an active member of the Japanese Circulation Society, among other professional bodies. He was the first physician in Japan to perform the MitraClip procedure and serves on the Global MitraClip Complexity Advisory Board.

Dr Kate Gatenby is a Consultant Cardiologist at the Leeds General Infirmary (Leeds, UK) subspecialising in heart failure, echocardiography and obstetric cardiology. She has a particular interest in managing patients with combined valvular heart disease and heart failure, the integrated management of heart failure across primary and secondary care, identification and management of patients with advanced heart failure.