ERS Congress Chair Award 2019

Professor Manuel Cosio was born in Oviedo, Spain. Soon after finishing medical school in Madrid, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he completed medical and respiratory training at the university of Minnesota hospitals. This training was followed by a research fellowship at the Meakins-Christie laboratories in Montreal McGill University under the direction of Jim Hogg and Peter Macklem.

Joining the initial enthusiasm for the concept of the "small airways" in COPD, introduced by Hogg and Macklem, he learned of the importance of coupling morphology with physiology and clinical sciences (morphology-function correlations), contributing substantially to the "small airways" concept, and over the years to the understanding of the pathophysiology of COPD. The interest in COPD continued with a focus on the cellular inflammatory infiltrate in the lung of smokers, introducing the concept that the Tcell and an adaptive immune inflammatory reaction was likely an important pathogenic mechanism for emphysema and COPD. Following in this idea, Prof. Cosio alongside Marina Saetta and Alvar Agusti proposed the concept of the autoimmune mechanism in the pathogenesis of COPD.

Prof. Cosio has been an honorary member of SEPAR since 1987, and an active member of the ERS from its foundation, as well as a Fellow of the European Respiratory Society (FERS). He was Co-Chair of the previous ERS annual congress in Madrid, and Assistant Chief Editor of the European Respiratory Journal under the tenure of Prof. Marc Decramer as Chief Editor.

At McGill university he was Director of the Respiratory Division and a research director at the Meakins-Christie laboratories where he trained numerous clinical and research fellows from around the world. At present, having left McGill as an Emeritus Professor in 2010, he is a Professor at the Università di Padova, (Padua, Italy) where he continues teaching and directing research activities still trying to untangle the mechanisms of COPD.