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Frans Van de Werf
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A monument to his editorial achievement is the journal’s new impact factor for 2008, his final year in the editor’s chair, which in June was raised to 8.92, a remarkable increase (of more than 1 point) on the previous year.
“We’re still a long way off Circulation,” he says stoically,
“but we’re getting closer to JACC.”
Frans Van de Werf is professor of cardiology and chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. It was here that he qualified in 1972 and became full professor in 1990.
He lists his main research interests as coronary reperfusion, antithrombotic therapies, left ventricular function and cardiac imaging, and his clinical interests as ACS and thrombolysis. His group in Leuven has run multicentre trials which in total have randomised more than 40,000 subjects, including the GUSTO (Global Utilization of Streptokinase and Tissue Plasminogen Activator for Occluded Coronary Arteries) and ASSENT (Assessment of the Safety and Efficacy of New Thrombolytic Regimens) studies.
“Like many similar institutions of our size,” he says, “
we get research money from the government via several channels, but our biggest source of funding is contract research for industry. The European Union provides another source via its Seventh Research Framework Programme, and I welcome the ESC’s newly established research foundation, which I hope will make money available for specific cardiovascular projects in ESC member countries. We would certainly like to be more independent of the industry.”
Van de Werf was also chair of the ESC Task Force responsible for last year’s updated guidelines for the management of STEMI, which were launched in Munich and published a few months later in the EHJ. New for this latest edition were a large section on pre-hospital management (which applied a universal recommendation for reperfusion therapy within a framework of timelines), updated selection criteria for primary PCI and fibrinolysis, new guidance on antithrombotic co-therapies, and angiography after lytic therapy.
“Our recommendations on the choice between mechanical and pharmacological reperfusion were important,” says Van de Werf.
It is progress in the management of STEMI patients in hospital, whose mortality rates have fallen from 13 to just 4 per cent (at least in randomised trials) in relatively few years, which Van der Werf now notes as the highlight of his career so far - although there are no intimations of retirement for a few years yet. Indeed, he is presently active in Leuven’s stem cell programme which, with huge investment and a new direction in translational research, has already reported an apparently beneficial effect of stem cell therapy on infarct size.
Such work, he agrees, is a far cry from his first serendipitous steps into ACS research. For it was in Leuven that his colleague Desiré Collen discovered tPA, and the young Van de Werf had in his lab an animal model which would prove ideal for examining the dissolution of clots. It was, like so many events in the progress of medicine, a fortuitous collaboration, but, with trials of tPA soon under way, one which would mark the first steps of a distinguished career which the ESC has now recognised in the award of its gold medal.