Looking back and thinking forwards — 15 years of cardiology and cardiovascular research

The first issue of Nature Reviews Cardiology was published in November 2004 under the name Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine . To celebrate our 15th anniversary in 2019, we invited six of our Advisory Board members to discuss what they considered the most important advances in their field of cardiovascular research or clinical practice in the past 15 years and what changes they envision for cardiovascular medicine in the next 15 years. Several practice-changing breakthroughs are described, including advances in procedural techniques to treat arrhythmias and hypertension and the development of novel therapeutic strategies to treat heart failure and pulmonary arterial hypertension, as well as those that target risk factors such as inflammation and elevated LDL-cholesterol levels. Furthermore, these key opinion leaders predict that machine learning technology and data derived from wearable devices will pave the way towards the coveted goal of personalized medicine. November 2019 marks 15 years since the launch of Nature Reviews Cardiology . To celebrate, we invited six of our Advisory Board members to discuss some of the highlights of cardiovascular research in the past 15 years and to make some projections about scientific research in the next 15 years. The contributors J.M.K. leads both clinical and research groups in the Department of Heart Rhythm Disorders at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. He has an international reputation as a leader in the field of atrial arrhythmia research and has authored >380 peer-reviewed publications. He serves on the editorial board of 12 international cardiology journals and is an associate editor of JACC Clinical Electrophysiology . He is the immediate past president of the Asia Pacific Heart Rhythm Society and served as scientific chair of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand for 6 years. S.L. is Professor in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the Faculty of Chemical & Pharmaceutical Sciences and Professor in Cell & Molecular Biology in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile in Santiago, Chile and adjunct professor in the Cardiology Division, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, USA. He is also the director of the Advanced Center for Chronic Diseases (ACCDiS) in Santiago, Chile. He has published >260 articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as book chapters. He is the current president of the Latino-American section of