Medical Research Council Professor of Immunopharmacology.
Stephen Holgate is Medical Research Council Professor of Immunopharmacology (since 1987) and Honorary Consultant Physician at Southampton University Hospital Trust (General Hospital site).
He received a BSc degree in Biochemistry in 1968 and completed his medical degree at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in 1971. After completing his training in general and internal medicine in London Postgraduate hospitals, he moved to Southampton in 1975 to 1980 during which time he completed specialist training in respiratory medicine and obtained his MD thesis on the subject of β-agonist resistance of human airways. Following a two-year post-doctoral fellowship with Dr K Frank Austen at Boston he returned to Southampton where he established his subsequent clinical and research base.
He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1984 and obtained his higher doctorate (DSc) from the University of Southampton in 1991 on the Inflammatory Basis of Asthma. He received a personal chair in 1984 and was awarded a Medical Research Council Clinical Research Chair in 1987, a position he has held since. Stephen Holgate is a past Censor of the Royal College of Physicians of England and Member of Council, past president of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology (1990-1993) and National Director for Clinical Trials in the National Health Service and Research & Development Director of the Wessex Regional health Authority and Associate Director of the South and West Regional Health Authority (1992-1995). He was a founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998.
Stephen Holgate was the Philip Ellman Lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians in 1990, the Hurst Brown Visiting Professor in Toronto in 1991 and the European Respiratory Society Cournand Lecturer in 1992. He received the Royal College of Physicians Graham Bull Prize for Clinical Research in 1993, and was the CIBA Foundation Lecturer in 1994. He was one of the Founder Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences and has received Fellowships of the Royal College of Pathology and the Institute of Biology.
While training and practising in respiratory medicine, Stephen Holgate has been especially interested in immunological and inflammatory mechanisms of asthma. He is co-editor of Clinical and Experimental Allergy with Professor A B Kay and editor of a number of textbooks on asthma and allergy. He has been a past, and is a current, editorial board member of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. He was President of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 1993-1995 and co-chaired (until 2007) the National Allergy Strategy Group following an RCP Enquiry into Allergy Services. He is a member of the FSA Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes (since 2005). He has been a Board Member of the Physiological Medicine and Infections Board of the Medical Research Council, is currently a Cross Board Member dealing with Co-operative Group Grants, Deputy Chairman of the MRC Advisory Board (MAB: 2003) and was a member of SCOPE, the overarching strategy policy and evaluation committee that reports to Council. In 2007 he was made Chairman of the Physiological Systems and Clinical Sciences Board, member of the Interim Strategy Group (ISG). He is also Chairman of the MRC Subcommittee on Evaluation and member of the Clinical Research Oversight Group. He is a past member of the NHS Central Research and Development Committee, DH Advisory Committee on Drugs (ACD), was Chairman of the DH Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP 1992-2001) and a member of the UK government DEFRA Expert Panel on Air Quality Standards (chairman from 2002). In 2002 Stephen Holgate became a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution which continues until September 2008. He is currently (2006/7) President of the British Thoracic Society and Chairman of the UK Respiratory Research Collaborative. In July 2007 he was appointed to the Translational Medicine Board of OSCHR.
In 1994 he delivered the Jack Pepys Lecture at the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology and received a Scientific Achievement Award at the International Association of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (IAACI) and in 1995 was awarded the RPR Foundation World Health Award. He has been Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt, Harvard, Yale, UCSF and UELA, Chicago, Rochester, Edmonton, Vancouver (BC), Wake Forest Universities and the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US and Canada. In 1997 he co-presented at the King’s Fund Centenary Lecture, introduced by HRH The Prince of Wales. In 1997 he was awarded an honorary medical degree from Ferrara University. In 1998 he gave the Brian Sproule Lectureship, University of Alberta. In 1999 he received an honorary PhD from the Jagellonian University, Krakow, Poland and in 2000 delivered the Royal College of Physicians Lumleian Lecture.
In 1999 he was jointly awarded the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine, delivered the 2000 Robert Cook Memorial Award at the AAAAI meeting in San Diego and in 2001 was its Honorary Fellow. He gave the Sir William Osler Lecture at the Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland in 2003 and was made an Honorary Member in 2004. In 2003 he received the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine and in 2004 received the University of Ghent Health and Life Sciences Gold Medal was elect Honorary Fellow of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Research in Immunopharmacology and awarded the British Pharmacology Society’s Quintiles Prize for Research in Immunopharmacology. He was elected to the American Association of Physicians in 2005 and Vice President of the British Lung Foundation.
Stephen Holgate is the author of over 800 per reviewed papers and scientific contributions to journals and editor of major textbooks on asthma and rhinitis. He is co-editor of Clinical and Experimental Allergy, Associate Editor of Clinical Science and on the editorial board of 25 other scientific journals. He has edited over 50 books on asthma and allergic disease and is currently a co-editor of Allergy, Principles and Practice, the lead textbook in Allergy. Applying basic science to the clinical interface in allergy and asthma has been the guiding principle of Stephen Holgate’s career. This has involved him in environmental and genetic epidemiology, pharmacology and physiology. His research has focused on the cellular and mediator mechanisms of allergy and asthma with a specific emphasis on applications to diagnosis and treatment.
He currently runs an interdisciplinary research team of over 50 personnel with research interests in asthma mechanisms. The recognition that the remodelling of the airway seen in asthma needs to be considered in the context of interaction between epithelial and mesenchymal cells making up an airway wall “trophic unit” represents the main novel focus of Professor Holgate’s ongoing research programme. This focus has provided a novel interaction with colleagues interested in the genetics of asthma and, in particular, in searching for novel molecular pathways in which to more effectively intervene.
A particularly exciting breakthrough has been the identification of ADAM33 as a novel candidate gene from asthma and airway hyperresponsiveness. A major focus of the new work is to identify how ADAM33 translates its activity as an asthma susceptibility gene. Related topics include the role of leukotrienes in remodelling, the interface between Th2 cytokines and the epithelial-mesenchymal trophic unit in asthma and the mechanisms behind the increased susceptibility of the asthmatic epithelium to respiratory virus infections.
According to the ISI Stephen Holgate was 8th most frequently cited author between 1989-1999 in the field of bimolecular science in the United Kingdom and in 2002 became a member of ISI’s most highly cited researcher database. Naturally, he is championing the expansion of lung research in the UK and in Health related science through his chairmanship of the UK Respiratory Research Collaborative (since 2006) and the Science in health Group of the Science Council (since 2004).