Current Research Day

Alan T. Remaley, MD, PhD, is the section chief of the Lipoprotein Metabolism Laboratory in the Translational Vascular Medicine Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in Bethesda, MD.  He is also a senior staff member of the department of laboratory medicine at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. 

Dr. Remaley received his BS in Biochemistry and Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981.  He received in 1987 an MD and PhD (Biochemistry) degree from the University of Pittsburgh and, in 1990, completed a residency in Clinical Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania. He did a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Bryan Brewer at NHLBI from 1990-1995. 

He has been the recipient of many awards for his research and has published over 500 papers in the field of lipoprotein metabolism and cardiovascular disease. He is an inventor on multiple patents related to new therapeutic agents and diagnostic tests for cardiovascular disease.  He has made important contributions to the field of High-density lipoprotein metabolism, particularly related to the mechanism of cholesterol efflux by the ABCA1 transporter and has developed apoA-I mimetic peptides and recombinant Lecithin:Cholesterol acyl transferase into therapies, which have been tested in early-stage clinical trials.  More recently, he has expanded his research into low-density lipoproteins (LDL), the main driver of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. He has developed an equation, which is widely used for estimating the cholesterol content of LDL, and described the first high-resolution structure of APOB100, the main protein constituent of LDL and the ligand for the removal of LDL from the circulation by its receptor. 

Andrew Plump, MD, PhD, is the president of Research and Development at Takeda and serves as a member of the company’s board of directors. His career spans nearly 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry and academia.

Dr. Plump has been recognized for his contributions to the health care industry, education, and the arts. He serves on several not-for-profit boards, including the Board of Trustees for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Sarnoff Cardiovascular Research Foundation, the Biomedical Science Careers Program, and as Chairman of the Board of Directors for the PhRMA Foundation.

Prior to Takeda, Dr. Plump served as head of Research and Translational Medicine, deputy to the president of R&D at Sanofi, based in Paris, France. Prior to Sanofi, Dr. Plump served as worldwide cardiovascular research head at Merck.

Dr. Plump received his MD from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), his PhD in cardiovascular genetics, and his BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in medical genetics at UCSF.

Dr. Owens is currently an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati. The primary focus of Dr. Owens's research is to examine the effects of coagulation proteins, proteases, and receptors in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease (CVD), specifically atherosclerosis and abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs).  We utilize genetically modified mice and mouse models of disease to generate data and attempt to verify these results in the human condition, when possible, with retrospective clinical data or human specimens.