ERS Gold Medal in COPD 2019

Ian Adcock is a Professor of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London.

His interests include understanding the mechanisms of relative corticosteroid insensitivity in COPD and in severe asthma and systems medicine approaches towards defining treatments for sub phenotypes of these patients.

Prof. Adcock defined how changes in histone acetylation controls inflammation, airway remodelling and corticosteroid responses in COPD. His has focused on how oxidative stress and cigarette smoke to enhance inflammatory processes and modulate corticosteroid function through suppressing HDAC2 enzyme activity and expression. He also demonstrated that enhanced oxidative stress also causes post-translational modifications on non-histone proteins to induce autoantibody expression. He described the key role of altered mitochondrial function and subsequent metabolic dysregulation in COPD pathogenesis as part of the MRC-ABPI COPDMAP consortia. Current work examines organoid models of COPD airways to interrogate these pathways.

Prof. Adcock has served the Airways Disease Assembly at the ERS for fourteen successive years at both Group and Assembly level, and now chairs its Long-Range Planning Committee. He has strived to incorporate science and clinical practice into the same education and symposia sessions and forge collaborations across the ERS Assemblies.