Drug Discovery and Development Symposium 2023: Meet the speaker
Dr Raymond Benza
Pathophysiology & pathogenesis of Group 2 Pulmonary Hypertension and therapeutic experience in adult clinical trials
Patients with pulmonary hypertension related to left heart disease are the most prevalent form of pulmonary vascular disease encountered in clinical practice. Indeed patients with combined precapillary postcapillary disease suffer mortal and morbid events that can exceed that of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Despite this, almost no therapeutic options exist for these patients and trials engaging contemporary pulmonary vasodilators in this disease state were fraught with failure. Further appreciation and understanding the underlying pathophysiology and pathology of this disease; however could shed light on both management maneuvers and therapeutic repositioning of drugs that may be efficacious for these patients. We will review these pathological nuances and suggest a paradigm for monitoring and guiding therapy using ambulatory cardiac monitoring following the addition of PAH specific therapy and evaluate the potential impact of this type of tiered strategy in designing future clinical trials.
About Dr Benza
Dr Raymond L Benza is the System Director of Pulmonary Hypertension at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American Heart Association Council on Clinical Cardiology, the American College of Chest Physicians and the American College of Cardiology. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine with certification in the subspecialties of cardiovascular diseases and advanced heart failure and transplantation. Dr Benza held positions on the Board of Directors, Governance Committee and Executive Committees at the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation.
He served on President Barak Obama’s Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation (ACOT) in the Health Resources and Services Administration for 4 years and was knighted in 2015 by his Royal Highness Vittorio Emanuele of Italy for his philanthropic work in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension. His primary clinical interests are the evaluation and treatment of advanced congestive heart failure, cardiac transplantation, and pulmonary arterial hypertension. He has participated in and held steering committee memberships for many of the major clinical studies of new therapies for the treatment of pulmonary hypertension.
Dr Benza is a funded investigator for the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association for his work in pulmonary arterial hypertension focusing on risk stratification, pharmacogenomics and new device therapies for this disease state. His clinical studies have led to the development of risk prognostic tools in PAH, including the REVEAL score and the pivotal use of implantable hemodynamic monitors (CardioMEMs) to remotely monitor and guide therapy in PAH.