Borja Ibanez

Borja Ibanez (Madrid, 1975). Medical Doctor (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), and PhD (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). Cardiology training at Fundación Jiménez Díaz University Hospital in Madrid. After completing MD and Cardiology training in Madrid, I moved to Mount Sinai School of Medicine, NY, USA to perform a 3 years training in basic and translational research. After returning to Spain, I started my independent career in 2009 as Group Leader at the CNIC. Since then I devote a 20% dedication to clinical cardiology at University Hospital Fundación Jiménez Díaz. This clinical activity is critical for my overall research plan since it allows me to be updated on the clinical needs and bring clinical questions to the lab to better understand pathophysiological processes and/or to find new therapeutic targets. I am also PI of a consolidated group of the national CIBER Cardiovascular. My primary scientific interest is to study myocardial diseases. I have devoted much efforts of my group to study acute myocardial infarction (ischemia/reperfusion injury), both at the basic research level (eg J Am Coll Cardiol 2016) and clinical levels even leading multicenter clinical trials where therapies identified by us in the lab have been proven beneficial to patients (eg Circulation 2013, Lancet 2019). We have identified the critical role of neutrophil´s beta1 adrenergic receptor activation during reperfusion injury (eg Nature Commun 2017, Eur Heart J 2020). We use non-invasive imaging as a tool to better understand biological processes occurring in the heart during disease conditions in a longitudinal and in-vivo conditions. By using this technology, we have unraveled novel processes involved in irreversible damage during myocardial infarction, such as the dynamics of post-reperfusion myocardial inflammation/healing (eg Circ Res 2017). More recently, I started a line dedicated to study the role mitochondrial dynamics in heart failure (Science 2015). The knowledge we gained about mitochondrial biology in myocardial disease allowed us to better understand anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity (eg J Am Coll Cardiol 2019). Within my ongoing ERC CoG grant, we have identified remote ischemic conditioning as an intervention protecting the heart from anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity by preventing mitochondrial fragmentation and dysregulated autophagy (Cardiovasc Res 2020). Based on these data, I am leading a multinational randomized clinical trial that will enroll 600 cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy to test this novel intervention as a means to reduce the incidence of heart failure in cancer survivors. According to Web of Science (WOS, September 2020), I have published 241 scientific articles, 50% as main author, which have received 10500 citations (44 cites per article). My H-index is 42. I have wrote 20 chapters in books, some of them in reference textbooks of clinical cardiology or cardiovascular development. I have obtained overlapping competitive funding from national and international agencies since I became independent. Among them, I am recipient of an ERC Consolidator grant (2018 call), and several H2020 consortium grants. I am inventor of 4 patents. To tackle scientific questions from disparate angles, I have built a highly multidisciplinary group including basic researchers, clinicians, physicists, and engineers. I have directed 18 doctoral thesis (plus 4 ongoing), and supervised 5 postdoctoral fellows (including one Marie Curie Individual Global Fellowship). I am Associate Editor at the Journal of American College of Cardiology and I am member of several editorial boards. I actively participate in grant evaluations at the international level and I served as President of the Cardiovascular Panel for the ISCiii FIS funding scheme. I have participated in several European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Clinical Practice Guidelines, serving as Chairman of the ESC Clinical Practice of ST-Elevated Acute Myocardial Infarction in 2017.