The coronavirus may have quashed plans to socialize and stroll the canals of Amsterdam while at this year’s European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress, but organizers are promising a historic digital experience that will “once again, be a celebration of discovery and ground-breaking science.”
“My message — if I have to choose only one thing why ESC 2020 will be a historic event — is that the physician working at the Cleveland Clinic, who was planning to attend this year in Amsterdam, as well as the colleague in a bush hospital in Uganda, who would have never have dreamed to be part of the ESC Congress, both will have for the first time the same access at the same time to knowledge shared at the worldwide leading cardiovascular meeting,” Marco Roffi, MD, co-chair of the scientific program, told theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology.
Taking a page from the American College of Cardiology, which set the virtual bar early in the pandemic with its highly interactive ACC 2020, ESC is taking some 80 Hot Line, clinical practice guidelines, and special sessions live with question-and-answer interactions and panel discussions.
The latest COVID-19 research and four new guideline documents — including recommendations on atrial fibrillation (AF), non-ST-segment elevation acute coronary syndromes, sports cardiology and exercise in patients with cardiovascular disease, and adult congenital heart disease — will be featured at the ESC Congress 2020, scheduled for August 29 to September 1.
Presentations will be shorter and sessions more focused, but more than 500 scientific and educational sessions will be streamed in addition to more than 4000 abstracts available live or on demand as full presentations or e-posters, said Roffi, University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland.
To pull off the virtual event, a digital studio in Amsterdam will host hundreds of key opinion leaders, and ESC employed more than 1000 satellite studios around the world to gather contributions from scientists and experts with the help of 70 behind-the-scenes experts.
Nevertheless, a “strategic decision” was made to provide free access to the event and its content for 30 days — a strategy that has attracted some 58,000 registrants thus far, up from a record 32,000 attendees at last year’s congress in Paris, Roffi said.
“Obviously, the income will not be the same as a physical congress, but we felt there was too much at stake to make a compromise,” he said. “We believe we are the leaders in cardiovascular meetings in the physical ones and we want to keep this position even in the new era. And we believe this is the beginning of a new era in whatever form will be.”
Hot Line Sessions 1-3, Saturday (14:00 CEST)
The Hot Line sessions will feature 13 clinical trials and kick off with EMPEROR-Reduced, which compared the sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor empagliflozin (Jardiance, Boehringer Ingelheim/Eli Lilly) added to standard care in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), with and without diabetes.
Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim already announced the trial met its composite primary endpoint of reducing cardiovascular (CV) death or HF hospitalization risk but the details will be important given the SGLT2 inhibitors› rapid shift beyond diabetes to HF and chronic kidney disease (CKD).
Results presented at ESC 2019 from the landmark DAPA-HF trial led to the recent new indication for dapagliflozin (Farxiga, AstraZeneca) for HFrEF in the absence of diabetes. New data will be released in a Sunday Hot Line session looking at the SGLT2 inhibitor among diabetic and nondiabetic CKD patients in DAPA-CKD, which was halted early because of overwhelming efficacy.
As the indication evolved, the SGLT2 inhibitors became truly cardiovascular disease drugs, Roffi said, “so all the cardiologists will have to become familiar with these agents.”
Hot Line 2 will look at the oral cardiac myosin inhibitor mavacamten as an alternative to surgery or percutaneous interventions to treat obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). The first-in-class investigational agent is thought to reduce the hypercontractility characteristic of HCM by inhibiting excessive actin-myosin cross-bridges, and it showed promise in the recent phase 2 dose-finding MAVERICK HCM trial.
Investigators are expected to flesh out details from the 251-patient phase 3 EXPLORER-HCM trial, which reported functional and symptomatic gains with once-daily dosing in top-line results released by developer MyoKardia.
“This is really a revolutionary way to treat — hopefully successfully — this very complex disease,” Roffi said.
Rounding out the day is the EAST-AFNET 4 trial, which has been almost 10 years in the making and examined whether early rhythm control with antiarrhythmic drugs and catheter ablation can prevent adverse outcomes in patients with AF compared with usual care alone based on the ESC 2010 AF treatment guidelines.