HYAFIL, Fabien (France)
It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to participate at the YPL program and meet colleagues from different countries and working in other fields of Medicine than mine.
I am working as Assistant Professor in the Departments of Cardiology and Nuclear Medicine of Bichat University Hospital in Paris, France. I have obtained a Medical Degree at the Faculty of Medicine Paris-Ouest, part of the University Paris-CitÈ. During my residency, I got interested in the field of Cardiology. I took care every day of young and older patients presenting with acute myocardial infarctions complicated sometimes by cardiac arrests, but I remained frustrated that these patients could not be identified earlier, before these dramatic complications occur.
I therefore started a PhD to develop imaging techniques that could help to identify patients at risk of acute MI. One of the main reasons why it is difficult to detect early these patients is that acute MI is most often caused by the sudden rupture of an atherosclerotic plaque located in coronary arteries followed by thrombus formation. Before rupture, these plaques present however specific morphological and biological properties, which could give the opportunity to identify them with imaging. I first started this research in France and then I have spent two years at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. I have developed several new imaging techniques of atherosclerosis and obtained a PhD.
When I came back from New York, I went back to clinics and did a fellowship in Cardiology at Bichat University Hospital in Paris. The most promising techniques to identify dangerous atherosclerotic plaques are based on Nuclear Medicine. I therefore pursued my career in this field. I have now started several studies to translate these new imaging techniques into the clinical field. I explore daily atherosclerotic plaques from patients admitted for acute MI, but also from patients with ischemic stroke, which shares a similar patho-physiology. I hope that my research work will help to improve our understanding on how acute complications of atherosclerosis occur and to develop new
strategies for prevention.