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Symposium 17: Targeting Heart Failure in Women

Tracks
Track 1
Thursday, July 16, 2026
11:15 AM - 1:15 PM

Details

The most common form of heart failure in women is heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Despite this, females are under-represented in clinical and preclinical studies, and current HFpEF management is not sex-specific. Affected patients exhibit shortness of breath, elevated cardiac BNP and poor survival rates, despite no impairment in ejection fraction (EF). No current approved interventions reduce mortality or improve recovery from HFpEF. This symposium is designed to consider whether pharmacotherapy for the most common forms of heart failure, and indeed heart failure in general, should be considered on the basis of biological sex, and which existing or potential new pharmacotherapies offer promise for improving prognosis in affected women.


Speaker

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Prof Amrita Ahluwalia
Queen Mary University of London

Targeting NO in hypertensive HF-does it work in women?

Abstract

Biography

Amrita is a Principal Investigator at Queen Mary University of London leading the Vascular Pharmacology Group. She is a translational pharmacologist taking her basic bench discoveries to the clinical setting leading experimental medicine studies and several phase IIa and IIb studies. Her research focuses on understanding the role of inflammation in cardiac and vascular disease with a focus upon the non-canonical pathway for NO generation i.e. the nitrate-nitrite-NO pathway and delineating the mechanisms that underlie sex differences in cardiovascular physiology and disease. She received the GSK Prize for Clinical Pharmacology (2012) from the British Pharmacological Society and the Women In Science & Engineering (WISE) Prize for Research UK in 2015 and was awarded Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2024. She was recognised for her high impact work being one of the Clarivates most highly cited researchers in 2023 and 2024. Amrita was Editor-In-Chief of The British Journal of Pharmacology (2016-2022), a Fellow of The British Pharmacological Society and is Chair of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR) Basic & Translational Section (2022-2024) and a member of the NC3Rs Review Committee (2017-2021) and the ARRIVE Guidelines Panel. Amrita is committed to equality in the workplace and has led numerous initiatives supporting both gender and racial equality in the workplace.

Session chair

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Miles De Blasio
Monash University

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Melissa Reichelt
University of Queensland

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