@article{3105467,
    title = "Short-term therapies for treatment of acute and advanced heart failure—why so few drugs available in clinical use, why even fewer in the pipeline?",
    author = "Pollesello, P. and Gal, T.B. and Bettex, D. and Cerny, V. and Comin-Colet, J. and Eremenko, A.A. and Farmakis, D. and Fedele, F. and Fonseca, C. and Harjola, V.-P. and Herpain, A. and Heringlake, M. and Heunks, L. and Husebye, T. and Ivancan, V. and Karason, K. and Kaul, S. and Kubica, J. and Mebazaa, A. and Mølgaard, H. and Parissis, J. and Parkhomenko, A. and Põder, P. and Pölzl, G. and Vrtovec, B. and Yilmaz, M.B. and Papp, Z.",
    journal = "Journal of Clinical Medicine Research",
    year = "2019",
    volume = "8",
    number = "11",
    publisher = "MDPI",
    issn = "1918-3003, 1918-3011",
    doi = "10.3390/jcm8111834",
    keywords = "cardiovascular agent;  catecholamine;  levosimendan;  nesiritide;  omecamtiv mecarbil;  serelaxine;  unclassified drug;  urodilatin;  vasoactive agent, acute heart failure;  artificial intelligence;  cardiovascular mortality;  drug development;  endothelial dysfunction;  follow up;  heart infarction;  heart left ventricle ejection fraction;  heart muscle contractility;  hemodynamics;  hospitalization;  human;  machine learning;  meta analysis;  morbidity;  oxygen consumption;  oxygen saturation;  pathophysiology;  phase 2 clinical trial (topic);  phase 3 clinical trial (topic);  phenotype;  randomized controlled trial (topic);  Review;  short course therapy;  systematic review",
    abstract = "Both acute and advanced heart failure are an increasing threat in term of survival, quality of life and socio-economical burdens. Paradoxically, the use of successful treatments for chronic heart failure can prolong life but—per definition—causes the rise in age of patients experiencing acute decompensations, since nothing at the moment helps avoiding an acute or final stage in the elderly population. To complicate the picture, acute heart failure syndromes are a collection of symptoms, signs and markers, with different aetiologies and different courses, also due to overlapping morbidities and to the plethora of chronic medications. The palette of cardio-and vasoactive drugs used in the hospitalization phase to stabilize the patient’s hemodynamic is scarce and even scarcer is the evidence for the agents commonly used in the practice (e.g. catecholamines). The pipeline in this field is poor and the clinical development chronically unsuccessful. Recent set backs in expected clinical trials for new agents in acute heart failure (AHF) (omecamtiv, serelaxine, ularitide) left a field desolately empty, where only few drugs have been approved for clinical use, for example, levosimendan and nesiritide. In this consensus opinion paper, experts from 26 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, U.K. and Ukraine) analyse the situation in details also by help of artificial intelligence applied to bibliographic searches, try to distil some lesson-learned to avoid that future projects would make the same mistakes as in the past and recommend how to lead a successful development project in this field in dire need of new agents. © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland."
}