Meet the ESC Gold Medallists: Professor Lars Køber
30 Aug 2025
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ESC Gold Medallist Professor Lars Køber‘s (University of Copenhagen - Copenhagen, Denmark) outstanding contribution to cardiovascular medicine comes from his tireless research on cardiovascular epidemiology and his integral involvement in groundbreaking clinical trials, particularly in heart failure, ischaemic heart disease and atrial fibrillation.
“I think I have been lucky to live through a fantastically creative time in cardiology, which has seen so many advances in the management of heart failure through team efforts. It has been a huge privilege for me to be able to work alongside people who share my interests and motivation – achievements are not ‘mine’ but ‘ours’. Part of the appeal for me lies in the actual processes of clinical trials, working together to find the most effective ways to conduct them to answer the questions at hand.
I am particularly proud of our nationwide studies, which also helped to put Denmark on the map of cardiology research. For almost four years, we lived and breathed the Danish Trandolapril Cardiac Evaluation (TRACE) trial,1 and it was a great experience for us to be rewarded with the finding that ACE inhibitors were life-saving post myocardial infarction. I was also part of the team that devised the DANISH study, which reported in 2016.2 This trial challenged conventional wisdom at that time that the benefits seen with prophylactic implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) for patients with symptomatic systolic heart failure and coronary artery disease would extend to people without coronary artery disease. The hostility the trial attracted from within the medical community at its outset changed completely when the results showed that there was no long-term mortality benefit of the ICD approach over conventional medical therapy. This reinforced to me that you shouldn’t be deterred from investigating something you think is worthwhile just because others don’t agree with you.
In recent years, I have moved into trying to characterise heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) and to determine what is going on both inside the heart and outside the heart in these patients. Whereas heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) can have many causes, but a similar phenotype, HFpEF is a mixed bag of entities. For example, cardiac amyloidosis was originally defined as HFpEF. I think that the future will see a further breaking down of this umbrella term into more specific disease categories, which will help to tailor management approaches and hopefully improve patient outcomes.”
References
- Køber L, et al. N Engl J Med. 1995;333:1670–1676.
- Køber L, et al. N Engl J Med. 2016;375:1221–1230.
