Moving Towards Prime Time?

The 2009 Conference will be held in a new venue, the Waterville Valley Resort in New Hampshire. This site provides new opportunities for expansion and sharing unpublished research using the GRC format for oral presentations and poster sessions. The broad conference goal “Moving Towards Prime Time” for assisted circulation as a treatment option for heart failure patients will be accessed using the latest clinical outcomes, new basic understanding of the underlying biology and related engineering design principles of pediatric and adult circulatory assist and replacement systems. The Conference will convene a dozen session leaders, 30 speakers representing key areas of assisted circulation scientific research, design, and clinical application and 25+ posters with some 140+ participants for a five-day conference in this new and interesting location.

Fortunately, this emerging field includes the INTERMACS (Interagency Registry for Mechanically Assisted Circulation) registry under the auspices and guidance of the NHLBI, FDA and CMS. INTERMACS has activated over ninety-nine sites and entered over 1939 patients (09/2009). The registry includes an unprecedented store of clinical data and has a growing tissue repository. The planned sessions for this GRC conference will be able to exploit the registry’s unpublished data for inferences that should be useful in many of the sessions. Questions of patient and care-giver quality of life will be addressed.

The advent of smaller volume assisted circulation devices is broadening the field to include almost all body habitus from newborns and children to adult men and women. This conference provides the nidus for scientists, clinicians, and engineers to have an open and lively discussion of these disparate patient populations with industry and government specialists. Two areas of particular interest are defining “moderately-advanced” patient indications for clinical trials and using combination therapies that are capable of directing the recovery or regeneration of natural cardiac function with subsequent device removal.

The health relatedness of clinical heart failure continues among the heaviest burdens to the USA healthcare system in terms of human suffering and costs. Assisted circulation has demonstrated reversal of heart failure symptoms, improved quality of life, but has associated adverse events that require mitigation through research, clinical experience and understanding. This conference brings together the world leaders and young people with fresh ideas to seek solutions that will improve the quality of life for the patients progressing to the end-stages of heart failure, keeping them home, out of the hospital and rejoining society. This conference is made possible by the munificent support of the Gordon Research Conferences and generous contributions from industry.