CVAC

Professor Price is Primary Care Respiratory Society Professor of Primary Care Respiratory Medicine at the University of Aberdeen (UK). He was awarded Fellow of ERS (FERS) in 2016. He is also a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Allergic Rhinitis and its Impact on Asthma (ARIA) executive committee, the World Allergy Organization (WAO), Committee on Asthma, and the WAO Education Council.

Professor Price was the founding president of the Respiratory Effectiveness Group (http://www.effectivenessevaluation.org/), a not-for-profit, investigator-led initiative which uses an international collaborative approach to explore the optimum role of real-life research in informing clinical guidelines and improving patient care.

Professor Price completed his medical degree at Cambridge University in 1984. He was previously Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of General Practice at the University of Adelaide, Australia and held an Honorary Chair at the University of East Anglia, UK.

He is extensively involved in respiratory and allergy research; his areas of special interest are the ‘real-life’ effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions, clinical trial design, adherence, and patient attitudes to their disease. He has authored more than 490 peer-reviewed publications and is responsible for approximately US$50 million in research and clinical development grants. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Pragmatic and Observational Research and member of the editorial board of several respiratory journals, including The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

Pete Smith is an Allergy Specialist based in Southport Qld. He did his RACP training Adelaide and a PhD in Molecular Immunology before working in London at the ICH and Great Ormond St in Food Allergy. He is a Professor in Clinical Medicine at Griffith University in Southport Qld, and is doing research in hypersensitivity, allergic rhinitis and food allergy. He is the Medical Director of Allergy Medical in Brisbane. He is a member of ASCIA, EAACI, AAAAI and WAO and has worked on expert committees with each of these organisations. He has been involved with the allergy working party of REG since 2013.

Dr. Mohsen Sadatsafavi is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC)’s Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and holds affiliations with the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, the Division of Respiratory Medicine and the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation at UBC. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in epidemiology and health outcomes from UBC in 2012.

Dr. Sadatsafavi’s research interests include epidemiology with a focus on decision analysis, at both clinical and policy levels, as well as on advancing epidemiological methods. He is involved in various studies in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD), especially on developing and validating prediction models, cost-effectiveness modelling of emerging health technologies, and using the provincial, national and international health administrative databases to measure burden of diseases.

Dr Eve Denton is a Respiratory, Sleep and Allergy Physician with a special interest in severe asthma who combines clinical work and research at the Alfred and St Vincent’s Hospitals in Melbourne. After finishing her M.B.B.S(Hons) in 2008 she completed Basic Physician Training at the Alfred Hospital and undertook Respiratory and Sleep Medicine training at the Alfred Hospital and St Vincent’s Hospitals in Melbourne, qualifying as a Respiratory and Sleep Physician in 2016. During her basic and advanced training she completed a Masters of Public Health at Monash University focusing on epidemiology, biostatistics and clinical research and culminating in a minor thesis in lung cancer epidemiology. After finishing her specialty training she completed a two year clinical and research Fellowship at the Alfred Hospital focusing on Allergy and Asthma. She has an interest in inducible laryngreal obstruction and performs nasal endoscopy as well as assisting in setting up the Alfred Hospital Exercise-induced Laryngeal Obstruction (EILO) Service. She is currently undertaking a full time PhD in the area of Severe Asthma as well as her clinical duties and has published widely in peer reviewed journals.

Dr Alan Kaplan is a Family Physician working in York Region, Ontario, Canada and the Chairperson of the Family Physician Airways Group of Canada (www.fpagc.com), the Past- Chairperson of the Respiratory Section of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, and Senate member of the International Primary Care Respiratory Group. He co-chaired the Community Standards of COPD program for Health Quality Ontario. He is the medical director of the Pulmonary Rehabilitation program for the local health integration network.

Janwillem Kocks is a practising General Practitioner and Assistant Professor at the department of General Practice and Elderly Care Medicine at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands.

He chairs the GRIAC primary care research group.

He obtained his medical degree in 2004 at the University of Groningen. In January 2005 he started his PhD research within the Groningen Research Institute on Asthma and COPD (GRIAC) resulting in his thesis “Towards health status guided care in COPD”. He combined his PhD training with the specialist training for general practitioner and graduated as general practitioner in March 2009.

He was visiting senior research fellow at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand (headed by Professor Richard Beasley) between July 2013 and February 2014. He did a visiting professorship at the Observational & Pragmatic Research Institute (headed by Professor David Price) end of 2017.

Furthermore, he started his company Miegum in 2001, developing Internet-based software applications.

He founded, amongst others, the Dutch AIOTHO network (general practitioners trainees combining their training with research). He developed the Primary Care Respiratory Group (IPCRG) and H2020 FRESH AIR web platforms. He is member of the Dutch COPD Astma Huisartsen Advies Groep (CAHAG) research committee and the IPCRG UNLOCK initiative.

He is board director of the International Primary Care Respiratory Group (IPCRG), secretary of the General Practice and Primary care Group of the European Respiratory Society (ERS), and Board member of the Groninger Research Institute for Asthma and COPD (GRIAC).

His current research focuses on diagnosis and individualised management of both asthma and COPD in primary care.

Dr. Mohit Bhutani’s achievements in the clinical, research and educational aspects of respiratory diseases have contributed to his recognition as a leading member of the respiratory community. Dr. Bhutani completed his medical degree and core internal medicine residency at the University of Saskatchewan, followed by fellowships in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Western Ontario in 2004. He joined the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta as assistant professor in the Division of Pulmonary Medicine in 2005. He was promoted to associate professor of medicine in 2011 and professor in 2019.

Dr. Bhutani has been an active member of the Division of Pulmonary Medicine. He was associate program director of the Pulmonary Fellowship Program from 2005-2017. He is the director of the Asthma and COPD clinics and a member of the  executive of the Alberta Research Center. Provincially, he has been involved with the Alberta Health Services Respiratory Health Strategic Clinical Network since 2011 and, from 2014-2020, co-chaired the Airways Working Group of the Respiratory Health Strategic Clinical Network (RHSCN).The primary aim of the RHSCN is to improve and standardize the delivery of respiratory care to all patients in both urban and rural settings. Nationally, he chairs the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Adult Respiratory Examination Board and is the current past chair of Canadian Thoracic Society COPD Clinical Assembly. He was elected to the Canadian Thoracic Society Executive in June 2020.

His past leadership positions include that of chair of the Scientific Committee of the 2018 Canadian Respiratory Conference.

Dr. Bhutani’s research in COPD and asthma has garnered many provincial and national research awards and he has been involved in phase 2 and 3 clinical trials evaluating the effectiveness of new drug therapies. His endeavors have secured more than $2.4 million dollars in research funding to date. His research work has been published in high impact journals such as The Journal of Physiology, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, CHEST and New England Journal of Medicine. He has been one of the lead authors of the last 3 COPD guidelines, and is currently working on the 2022 CTS Pharmacotherapy Guidelines. As a result of his work, he has been asked to present  at many conferences and accredited courses nationally and internationally. He is an ad hoc reviewer for the Canadian Journal of Respiratory, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine.

Dr. Job van Boven is an expert in health economics (e.g. cost-effectiveness, burden of disease) and real-world drug outcomes (e.g. (pharmaco)epidemiology, medication adherence, compliance, persistence), mainly applied to lung diseases (asthma, COPD, TB, lung cancer).

Nikolaos (Nikos) Papadopoulos is a world leading expert in allergy and asthma, through work on basic, translational and clinical aspects of the disease, as well as advocacy, pursued continuously for over 20 years. The focus of his research has been the role of infection, in particular rhinovirus (RV) infection, on asthma exacerbations and its interaction with atopy as keystone events of respiratory allergy pathophysiology as well as targets for treatment. Aspiring to develop impactful interventions at the clinical and public health domains, he has contributed to guidelines, real-life research and precision medicine.

He did his medical and doctoral studies at the University of Athens, Greece and postdoctoral studies at the University of Southampton, UK, under the guidance of Sir Stephen Holgate and Sebastian Johnston. He then pursued an academic career in Athens, becoming Professor and Head of the Pediatric Allergy Department. In 2014 he was offered a Professorship at the University of Manchester and he is since running two active groups with overlapping but distinct research directions. From 2021, he has also been appointed Professor of Allergy, Immunity and Infection at OPRI, to pursue real-life research in respiratory medicine.

In the course of this career, he has identified some of the key mechanisms leading from common viral exposures to asthma exacerbations and persistence: his original studies in Southampton conclusively showed that RVs are capable of and infect the bronchial mucosa in humans (J Med Virol, 1999, J Infect Dis, 2000). They then induce local inflammation, initiating the exacerbation cascade (Clin Exp All, 2001), and synergize with house dust mite antigens (Clin Exp All, 2008). He has been the first to show that RVs can become cytotoxic (Respir Res, 2005) and induce viremia (AJRCCM, 2005). Explaining why atopic asthmatics are more susceptible to mild infectious agents than healthy individuals, he demonstrated already in 2002, a Th2 shifted, defective immune response to RV in asthma (Thorax 2002), followed by clinical proof of how atopy skews the duration of post-viral airway hyperresponsiveness (JACI 2005). A milestone finding was the capacity of RV to induce airway remodeling-associated growth factors with functional capacity (JACI 2006, CEA 2008, CTA 2012), suggesting that repeated viral infections may be the drivers of asthma persistence and the transition from wheeze to asthma.

In more recent years, aspiring to address the challenges behind the generation of a vaccine for RV, he has identified a misdirected antibody response as a viral escape mechanism (FASEB J, 2012) and developed a chip capable of measuring subtype RV antibody responses (Nature Comm, 2018), with which he showed that while antibodies against type A and C RVs increase in parallel to the number of infections, there is little if any protection from subsequent events (AJRCCM, 2018). In the context of the EU project PreDicta (PAI, 2018), specific antisense inhibitors against RV infection (DNAzymes) were identified (JACI, 2019), while key molecular events were characterized, such as T-cell deviation induced by RV-induced IL33 (AJRCCM, 2014), the pivotal role of plasmacytoid dendritic cells in exacerbations (JACI 2018), and the functions of IL17 (Mucosal Immunol 2016), IFN-lamda (ERJ, 2017), IL-33 (Sci Rep, 2017), TGF-b (JACI 2017) and ILCs (Sci Rep, 2019).

Working with RVs, he has improved molecular diagnosis (J Virol Meth, 1999), has observed, for the first time, their impact on acute bronchiolitis in infants (AJRCCM, 2002) and in pneumonia in older children (Clin Infect Dis, 2004), has contributed to the development of the first functional RV mouse model (J Gen Virol, 2003) and has generated models evaluating asthma drugs (CEA, 2006, CEA 2009).

In parallel to his basic and translational research work he has remained clinically active, while he has been part of numerous efforts towards optimization of asthma treatment, proposing, among other, an algorithm for pediatric asthma phenotyping (Allergy, 2008), an algorithm for the use of molecular diagnosis to inform allergen immunotherapy for rhinitis and asthma (IAAI, 2013) and has led the 2012 International Consensus on Pediatric Asthma (Allergy, 2012). In the context of the EU project EARIP, he has proposed a stakeholder map to target advocacy actions for asthma research (ERJ, 2017), while he is leading efforts to recognize the value and standardize real-life research in asthma (CTA 2019, ERJ 2019).

He has a passion for education, having supervised more than 20 PhDs, has organized over 100 educational events and has trained doctors in the clinic and researchers in the lab. He is invited speaker at international events more than 30 times a year.

He has participated and/or led several European high-impact projects related to asthma or allergy, from FP5 all the way to Horizon2020. Notably, he joined BIOAIR (FP5, 2000-2004), longitudinally evaluating biomarkers of severe asthma, was among the team that designed and run GA2LEN (FP6, 2004-8), the Global Allergy & Asthma European Network, coordinated “PreDicta” (FP7, 2010-2016), evaluating the post-infectious immune reprogramming and its association with persistence and chronicity of asthma, and is currently the coordinator of the Horizon2020 Future & Emerging Technologies “CURE”, constructing a ‘Eubiosis-Reistatement Therapy’ for asthma (2017-2022).

He has participated in and actively served many international societies, including committees of the ERS and EFA, but most notably EAACI, of which he was President 2013-2015 and the Respiratory Effectiveness Group (REG), of which he was President from 2018-2020.

For his work he has received several international awards, among other, the EAACI Clemens von Pirquet Award (2019), the PhARF award (2010), the Klosterfrau International Award for Research in Pediatric Asthma (2003) and the ERS Annual Award for Pediatric Respiratory Research in Europe (2004). Overall, he has published over 500 papers, receiving more than 38000 citations and an h-index of 84 (Google Scholar).

He is Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers in Allergy, Associate Editor of Clinical & Translational Allergy and member of the Editorial Boards of several scientific journals.

His latest research direction has led to the establishment of a metagenomics laboratory in Manchester that is currently exploring the role of the respiratory virome and metagenome in asthma activity and exacerbations. In Athens he is evaluating potential interventions against rhinoviruses using microRNAs, while at the international front, he has organized PeARL (Pediatric Asthma in Real-Life), a think tank that aims to contribute in the everyday management of the disease and has evaluated the impact of the COVID pandemic on pediatric asthma patients (JACI:In Practice, 2020).

Dr. Kostikas is Respiratory Physician with long-standing clinical and research experience in different Greek and international setting (academic, clinical, research and industry), with excellent skills in communication, patient management, publication planning and study design and execution.

Dr. Kostikas has been involved in several posts of the European Respiratory Society (ERS), including HERMES Examination Committee and the role of Learning Resources Director. Dr. Kostikas’ research activities focus on asthma and COPD (biomarkers, phenotyping, comorbidities and exacerbations). Dr. Kostikas is a member of the Editorial Board of PLoS ONE, and peer reviewer for all major respiratory journals. Dr. Kostikas has more than 170 publications in PubMed (over 3,300 citations and h-index 29) and contributed several chapters to medical textbooks, focusing on asthma, COPD and biomarkers.

Chris Gale is a Professor of Neonatal Medicine, and works clinically as an honorary consultant neonatologist at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust. His research focuses on neonatal population health - improving neonatal care through large clinical trials, observational research and population-level surveillance. Chris leads two of the largest randomised controlled trial ever undertaken in preterm care, aiming to prevent necrotising enterocolitis: the neoGASTRIC trial, and the United Kingdom arm of the WHEAT International trial. He leads surveillance of perinatal brain injuries for the Department for Health and Social Care in England, and monitoring of babies affected by SARS-CoV-2 infection in the neonatal period. Chris has led observational research to improve feeding practices and nutrition of term and preterm babies. A central aspect of this work is meaningful parent and patient involvement in neonatal research, particularly in randomised controlled trials. Other research interests include better understanding how prematurity and other early life factors influence health throughout later life, and efficiently disseminating clinical research findings to ensure evidence based neonatal care. He studied Medicine at the University of Newcastle and undertook paediatric training in Sydney and London. He gained an MSc in Clinical Paediatrics at the UCL Institute of Child Health; his thesis examined neonatal and perinatal transfers of extremely preterm babies. His PhD at Imperial College London examined the influence of infant feeding on adiposity, hepatic lipid and metabolic phenotype. He has been supported by the Medical Research Council through a Clinician Scientist and Transition Support Fellowships and by the National Institute of Health Research as a Clinical Lecturer and a Clinical Trials Fellow.

Prof Lugogo is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is a pulmonologist who specializes in the management of severe asthma. She participates in clinical research in asthma