Dr Paul Ridker
Senior Physician, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
Speaker's biography
Formally trained in cardiovascular medicine and epidemiology, Dr Paul M Ridker is the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and directs the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, a translational research unit at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dr Ridker’s research focuses on the design and conduct of multi-national randomized trials, the development of inflammatory biomarkers for clinical and research use, the molecular and genetic epidemiology of cardiovascular diseases, and on novel strategies for cardiovascular disease detection and prevention.
As a preventive cardiologist, Dr Ridker is best known for his work developing the inflammatory hypothesis of heart disease, the clinical application of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) testing as a method to better evaluate cardiovascular risk, and the demonstration in 2008 in the large-scale JUPITER trial that statin therapy is highly effective at reducing heart attack and stroke when given to men and women with elevated hsCRP levels. Currently, Dr Ridker serves as Trial Chairman and Principal Investigator of two multi-national, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials designed to address whether reducing inflammation can reduce cardiovascular event rates. These trials are the Canakinumab Anti-Inflammatory Thrombosis Outcomes Study (CANTOS) and the NHLBI funded Cardiovascular Inflammation Reduction Trial (CIRT).