ERS Gold Medal in Asthma 2016

Ian D. Pavord, MA DM FRCP FMedSci FERS is Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Oxford and Honorary Consultant Physician at the Oxford University Hospitals.

He is also a Professorial Fellow of St Edmund Hall.

Previously, he has undertaken the roles of Consultant Physician and Honorary Professor of Medicine and was elected as an NIHR Senior Investigator, an inaugural Fellow of the European Respiratory Society and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Professor Pavord has a research interest in the clinical aspects of inflammatory airway diseases and has been involved in a number of significant developments/discoveries in the field, including pioneering the use of non-invasive measures of airway inflammation in the assessment of these conditions. He has also identified a number of clinically important phenotypes of inflammatory airway disease.

Professor Pavord was also the lead investigator of a key proof of concept study of Mepolizumab in 2009, paving the way for the successful phase 3 trials of this agent and its subsequent registration for use in severe eosinophilic asthma.

Others achievements include:

• He has shown that stratification of airways disease by the pattern of airway inflammation is more coherent than current classification systems and that treatment guided by measures of airway inflammation results in better outcomes

• He has shown that the main impact of persistent eosinophilic airway inflammation is an increased risk of asthma attacks – work which was instrumental to the successful clinical development of biological agents targeting Th2 associated cytokines

• He has developed simple, clinically accessible biomarkers for the presence of eosinophilic airway inflammation which are beginning to impact on clinical practice.