Asthma and COPD: Basic Mechanisms and Clinical Management

Peter Barnes is Professor of Thoracic Medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Head of Respiratory Medicine at Imperial College and Honorary Consultant Physician at Royal Brompton Hospital, London. He qualified at Cambridge and Oxford Universities was appointed to his present post in 1987. He has published over 1000 peer-review papers on asthma, COPD and related topics and has edited over 40 books. He is also amongst the top 50 most highly cited researchers in the world and has been the most highly cited clinical scientist in the UK and the most highly cited respiratory researcher in the world over the last 20 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007, the first respiratory researcher for over 150 years. He is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the WHO/NIH global guidelines on asthma (GINA) and COPD (GOLD). He also serves on the Editorial Board of over 30 journals and is currently an Associate Editor of Chest and respiratory Editor of PLoS Medicine. He has given several prestigious lectures, including the Amberson Lecture at the American Thoracic Society and the Sadoul Lecture at the European Respiratory Society.

Jeffrey M. Drazen, MD, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Tufts University with a major in physics, and from Harvard Medical School. He served his medical internship and residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and was a clinical fellow and research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. Thereafter, he joined the Pulmonary Divisions of the Harvard hospitals and served for many years as chief of the combined Pulmonary Divisions at Beth Israel and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals. Currently, he is a Senior Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Distinguished Parker B. Francis Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, as well as Professor of Physiology, Harvard School of Public Health and adjunct Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. He has served on the NIH Respiratory and Applied Physiology Study Section, the NIH Pulmonary Disease Advisory Council, the NIH Lung Biology and Pathology Study Section, and the NHLBI Advisory Council. Through his research, he defined the role of novel endogenous chemical agents in asthma. This led to four new licensed pharmaceuticals for asthma used in the treatment of millions of people worldwide. He has published nearly 500 papers and edited 6 books. He has been a member of the editorial boards of many prestigious journals, including: the Journal of Applied Physiology, American Journal of Physiology, Pulmonary Pharmacology, Experimental Lung Research, Journal of Clinical Investigation, American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology, and the American Journal of Medicine. In addition, he has been associate editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation and the American Review of Respiratory Disease. In 2000, he assumed the post of editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. During his tenure, the Journal has published major papers advancing the science of medicine.

Neil Thomson is Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Glasgow, Head of Respiratory Medicine within the Division of Immunology, Infection & Inflammation and Honorary Consultant at Gartnavel General Hospital, Glasgow. He graduated from the University of Glasgow and undertook postgraduate training in Glasgow, London and McMaster University, Canada. He is a former member of the Committee for Safety of Medicine and former Chair of the Scientific Committee of the British Lung Foundation. He has co-edited several textbooks on asthma and COPD and published over 150 peer-reviewed papers on asthma. His current research interests include corticosteroid insensitivity in smokers with asthma, biomarkers in asthma and COPD and assessment of novel treatments for asthma.