Deepak Bhatt, MD, MPH: 5 Late-Breaking Trials to Watch at ACC 2024

Each year, the excitement surrounding the American College of Cardiology’s annual scientific sessions begins a gradual build beginning at the commencement of the American Heart Association’s annual scientific sessions in the late fall of the preceding year. It reaches a fever pitch leading into the cardiology community’s first flagship meeting of the year.

Part of the excitement surrounding the ACC’s annual meeting is the range and diversity of late-breaking and featured science presented at the meeting. This year, the ACC released the official list of late-breaking data for the 2024 meeting in late January. With 5 sessions dedicated to late-breaking data, the conference will be showcasing the results and findings from more than 20 trials, with 13 of these trials also designated for simultaneous publication in the American College of Cardiology, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A key opinion leader in the field of cardiology, Deepak Bhatt, MD, MPH, Dr. Valentin Fuster Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and director of Mount Sinai Heart, is a fixture of late-breaking clinical trial sessions at meetings of the ACC as well as other major professional organizations in cardiology. At this year’s meeting, Bhatt’s name is associated with nearly 30 pieces of data or discussions, including multiple late-breaking clinical trials such as EMPACT-MI and AEGIS-II trials.

For more insight into late-breaking data from this year’s meeting, our editorial team sat down with Bhatt and asked him what clinical trials he is most excited about from the various late-breaking sessions at the ACC’s 2024 annual scientific sessions.

Deepak Bhatt’s 5 Trials to Watch:

EMPACT-MI: Saturday, April 6 at 9:50 AM ET

Description: Designed with a primary outcome of interest of time to first hospitalization for heart failure or all-cause mortality, EMPACT-MI was launched to explore the safety and efficacy of empagliflozin among a post-MI patient population. A multinational, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, the endeavor randomized 5000 participants at approximately 480 centers in 22 countries and comes on the heels of the DAPA-MI at AHA 2023.

AEGIS-II: Saturday, April 6 at 10:10 AM ET

Description: The AEGIS-II trial is billed as the first trial to formally test whether enhancing cholesterol efflux could reduce risk of major adverse cardiovascular events. With a target sample size of 17,000, the trial was deisnged with time to first occurrence of the composite of CV death, MI, or stroke through 90 days as the primary outcome of interest.

REDUCE-AMI: Sunday, April 7 at 10:15 AM ET

Description: a registry-based, randomized, parallel, open-label, multicenter trial performed at 38 centers in Sweden,1 center in Estonia, and 6 centers in New Zealand, REDUCE-AMI was launched to explore the potential benefit of long-term oral beta-blockade in patients with acute MI and preserved ejection fraction. The trial’s primary outcome of interest is a composite of all-cause mortality or recurrent MI.

MINT Trial: Sunday, April 7 at 1:15 PM ET

Description: This presentation provide insight into a prespecified subgroup analysis from the Myocardial Ischemia and Transfusion (MINT) Trial, which concluded patients with acute MI and anemia (Hgb <10 g/dL), a liberal transfusion goal (Hgb ≥10 g/dL) was not superior to a restrictive strategy (Hgb 7-8 g/dL) with respect to 30-day all-cause death and recurrent MI.

ULTIMATE DAPT: Sunday, April 7 at 10:45 AM ET

Description: Ultimate DAPT is a prospective, multicenter randomized, double-blinded placebo-controlled trial designed to assess the safety and efficacy of 1- vs 12-month dual antiplatelet therapy in patients with acute coronary syndromes who underwent PCI.

Relevant disclosures for Bhatt include Amarin, AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Pfizer, Roche, Amgen, and Eli Lilly and Company, among others.