George Clinical rockstars to attend and present at the CKD3 Summit, May 6-8 in Boston. This conference focuses exclusively on overcoming the challenges limiting the development of more efficacious and disease-modifying drugs against diabetic nephropathy, genetic and glomerular kidney disease. This is what our mission at George Clinical is, and we are supporting collaborative efforts across the globe, including the conversations here.  

Will you be in Boston at this time? Let us know (use form below), so we can invite you to join and meet us!

Who is the Rockstar Team?

Prof Vlado Perkovic 

Vlado Perkovic is Executive Director of The George Institute, Australia, Professor of Medicine at UNSW Sydney, and a Staff Specialist in Nephrology at the Royal North Shore Hospital. His research focus is in clinical trials and epidemiology, in particular in preventing the progression of kidney disease and its complications. He leads several international clinical trials and has been involved in developing Australian and global treatment guidelines. He has played a central role in the development of an affordable dialysis system, which was a Eureka Prize finalist in 2017. Vlado is a member of the National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Committee on Research Translation and is on the Board of the Australian Clinical Trials Alliance and the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes. He is Chair of the International Society of Nephrology Advancing Clinical Trials (ISN-ACT) group; and is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. He serves on the Editorial Boards of some leading specialist and general journals, including the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Circulation, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

 Prof Hiddo Lambers Heerspink 

Hiddo Lambers Heerspink is affiliated with the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology of the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. degree from the medical faculty of the University Medical Center Groningen in 2008. He then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at The George Institute in Sydney, Australia where he investigated the effects of blood pressure lowering regimens on renal and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with renal impairment. Based on this work, he was awarded a young investigator grant and subsequently in 2015 a consolidator investigator grant from the Dutch organization of scientific research. 

Since 2010, Doctor Lambers Heerspink has held a position as a Clinical Pharmacologist at the University Medical Center Groningen. He is currently Professor Clinical Trials and Personalized Medicine. His main research interests include optimizing treatment strategies and finding new therapeutic approaches to halt the progression of renal and cardiovascular disease. His particular clinical research interest is to identify determinants of individual treatment responses and ways to optimize drug response in individual patients. To achieve these goals he is involved in various international clinical trials and uses biomarkers and imaging techniques to unravel pathways and determinants of therapy response.

 Kristina Figueroa, MSPH 

Kristina Figueroa is a T1D patient, advocate, and connector of people to knowledge. Her career and background combine her passion for advancing research in Cardiovascular, Renal and Metabolic Diseases while meeting people and patients where they are. She works in Business Development for Sydney-based George Clinical, helping connect rockstars like Prof Perkovic and Doctor Lambers Heerspink to Clinical Trials through a Scientific Leadership mode, driving site, physician and patient engagement by harnessing a peer-to-peer relationship of physicians and patients. Kristina is currently pursuing her own research in US Physician Prescription Criteria Patterns and Health Policy reform as a DrPH (Public Health) candidate at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. She aims to shift US health policy by evaluating market access through her research on prescription patterns, criteria, and patient outcomes.