The William McKenna Lecture: A Tribute to a Lifelong Leader in Inherited Cardiovascular Disease
It is with great pleasure that the BICCS Council announce that the key-note lecture at our annual conference will from now on be known as the William McKenna Lecture.
William McKenna (known to most as Bill) is one of the founding fathers in the field of inherited cardiovascular disease. His work on cardiomyopathies is well known to all, including papers on gene discovery, risk stratification, the development of diagnostic criteria and he is the author of a plethora of clinical guidelines.
Bill studied at Yale University in the 1960s before graduating as a physician from McGill University in Canada. But it was his career defining move to London to work with John Goodwin at the Hammersmith Hospital that introduced him to the world of heart muscle disease.
The condition we now know as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, was then ill defined, in an era before genetic testing, with only basic cardiac imaging and a heavy reliance on clinical skills. The scene was set for Bill to take up the mantle and over the next few years explored the role of M-mode and 2D echocardiography in the assessment of patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Bill measured arrhythmia burden and explored treatment options including beta-blockers and amiodarone which in the mid-1970s was a novel antiarrhythmic drug. In 1986 he described a cohort of patients with right ventricular VT with structural abnormalities of the right ventricle, simultaneous with the first descriptions of what would become known as arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy.
In 1988 he moved to St George’s Hospital in London as a Senior Lecturer. In 1991, using genetic linkage he was able to identify the first genetic variant (MYH7) responsible for familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in large Canadian family. There followed key publications demonstrating the role of plakoglobin in Naxos disease, and the role of MYBPC3 in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and was rewarded with the Chair of Cardiac Medicine in 1993.
In 2003 he moved his practice (and most of his team) to the Heart Hospital, London and became Professor of Cardiology at University College London and Director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Science at UCL in 2009. He combined clinical practice with the role of Clinical Director while his academic work continued developing risk stratification algorithms, undertaking natural history studies, studying genotype-phenotype correlations and leading clinical guideline development with the European Society of Cardiology.
He became the first President of the Association for Inherited Cardiac Conditions in 2009 and oversaw the establishment of the national body representing healthcare professionals in our field.
His career has been defined by relentless scientific inquisitiveness, and eye for an opportunity and an ability to form strong relationships with academics and clinicians across the world. He has helped shape the careers of many of us and the diaspora of those who have worked with him – Perry Elliott, Hugh Watkins, Sanjay Sharma and many others – is testament to his influence and impact on our field.
Although now retired from clinical practice, he continues to take a keen interest in our field and is currently Emeritus Professor of Cardiology at University College London.
It is therefore with great pleasure that we dedicate the key-note lecture at our annual conference each year in recognition to his lifetime’s work – the William McKenna Lecture.
Dr Stephen Page
President of the British Inherited Cardiovascular Conditions Society
