Ana Barac, MD, PhD
MedStar Health Heart and Vascular Insitute
Washington DC, USA
Ana Barac is an associate professor of medicine and oncology at Georgetown University and director of the MedStar Heart and Vascular Institute's cardio-oncology programme in Washington, USA. Her clinical and research interests focus on the mechanisms, diagnosis and treatment of cardiac complications from cancer therapies.
Dr Barac is internationally recognised for her work on cardiovascular health in patients with cancer. She is the founding and immediate-past chair of the American College of Cardiology (ACC) Cardio-Oncology Council. She serves as the co-director of the ACC's annual live course ‘Advancing Cardiovascular Care of the Oncology Patient’, and was chair of the Heart House Roundtable ‘Cardiovascular Function and Cancer Treatment’ in February 2018. Dr Barac is the editorial board member of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), and she serves as an associate editor of the new journal JACC: Cardio-Oncology and the Journal of Cardiovascular Translational Research.
Dr Barac has a background in basic science research on signalling pathways and was a visiting research fellow at the National Institutes of Health. In 2013, she was awarded a KL2 Scholar Award from the Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science for investigation of cardiac function in female BRCA-mutation carriers who were treated with anthracyclines. She served as the cardiology principal investigator for the SAFE-HEaRt trial, an investigator-initiated study that investigates safety of HER2 targeted therapies in patients with HER2 positive breast cancer and reduced cardiac function.
Dr Barac is a diplomate in cardiovascular disease and has advanced training in cardiac imaging, echocardiography and cardiac MRI.