Katrina Umback

One Australian suffers a heart attack every ten minutes, the most significant cause of premature cardiovascular death and driver of disability. Traditional risk factors help predict events, particularly at a community level. However, ~25% of first-time heart attack patients have no risk factor “alarms” and have developed silent coronary artery atherosclerosis over years. CAD Frontiers brings a new vision and strategy to tackle the greatest cause of premature death on our planet. Having reframed the question to one of our oldest health challenges, and brought together leading, multi-disciplinary scientists, health, and industry experts - we are poised to make giant breakthroughs in heart attack prevention. Our Mission is to detect and treat currently “invisible” coronary artery disease (CAD) to prevent heart attack via discovering and translating: • new blood biomarkers that identify silent CAD that are relevant to our entire community • new drugs that target the individual’s CAD susceptibility and halt disease CAD Frontiers pulls together an international team of clinicians, researchers, healthcare, and industry leaders with a track record of discovery and innovation into an effective platform combining discovery science, clinical trials and commercial translation. Our goals are to eradicate heart attacks by: 1. Developing and commercialising precision diagnostic tools for earlier CAD detection 2. Implementing identified diagnostics to identify and “hit” CAD early to prevent heart attacks 3. Discovering, developing, and testing advanced pharmaceutical therapies for CAD. We believe the time is right to achieve the “holy grail” of the cardiovascular field. Our vision is "A world without heart attacks". We believe that heart attacks could virtually be eliminated if we identify CAD early, and “hit it hard” with established and emerging therapeutics.