Advances in Interstitial Lung Disease

Louise Wain was appointed in 2017 as a GSK/British Lung Foundation Chair of Respiratory Research and is a member of the Genetic Epidemiology group at the University of Leicester. She has research interests in the genetic architecture of respiratory health and disease, focusing on pulmonary fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Her areas of expertise include the analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms and copy number variation (CNV) using array data and re-sequencing approaches. Louise has played a key role in large consortium projects including SpiroMeta (lung function), the International Consortium for Blood Pressure (ICBP) GWAS and has led the largest GWAS of IPF susceptibility to date. Louise was a co-lead of the UK BiLEVE study - the first genetic study in UK Biobank - and is an active researcher working on pulmonary fibrosis in the Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project. Louise is an Associate Editor for the European Respiratory Journal and, in addition to teaching at undergraduate and Masters level, leads doctoral training programme activities at the University of Leicester. She is currently one of the lead investigators of the new Post-Hospitalisation COVID-19 (PHOSP-COVID) Study and co-investigator of the largest UK study of post-COVID ILD.

Puja Mehta is a senior specialist registrar in Rheumatology in the London Deanery and is undertaking basic research in post-COVID interstitial lung disease (ILD) at UCL Respiratory.

Her research interests include rheumatic-associated ILD and experimental therapeutics.
During a pharmaceutical industry fellowship, Puja designed an interventional clinical trial of a monoclonal antibody in rheumatoid arthritis and an observational study to delineate the natural history of rheumatoid-arthritis-associated ILD (RA-ILD) to contextualise potential pulmonary safety signals.

Puja regularly teaches medical students and MSc students at UCL and Imperial College London.

His clinical and research focus is on interstitial lung disease and pulmonary fibrosis. There are three major themes of his research. 1) Understanding the functional consequences of genetic risk factors for the development and progression of pulmonary fibrosis. 2) Using pre-clinical models of disease to try and therapeutically manipulate molecular pathways to prevent the development or progression of fibrosis. 3) Undertaking a detailed assessment of patient cohorts with fibrotic disease using the PROFILE and INJUSTIS (The its not just idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis study) or potentially fibrotic disease UKILD Post COVID-19 (the UK interstitial lung disease post-COVID-19 study) to understand the risk factors and biomarkers that may predict the development of repair or fibrosis.

He completed his medical training at the University of Southampton before undertaking postgraduate training in respiratory medicine in London. During this time, he undertook basic scientific training funded by an ARC Fellowship (Applied research collaboration) and obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from University College London before doing post-doctoral studies at the University of California at San Francisco funded by an ARC Clinician Scientist Fellowship.

In 2005 he returned to the UK as a clinical senior lecturer at the University of Nottingham. In 2021 he moved to Imperial College London to lead the Margaret Turner Warwick Centre for Fibrosing Lung Diseases at the National Heart and Lung Institute.

He is currently the familial pulmonary fibrosis lead for the Genomics England Clinical Interpretation Partnership in Respiratory Medicine and is the Post Hospitalisation (PHOSP)-COVID-19 study fibrosis working group leader and leads the UK Interstitial Lung Disease consortium. He has been the joint editor-in-chief of the official journal of the British Thoracic Society since 2015. He was chair of the British Thoracic Society Science and Research Committee from 2016-2018.

He is a founding trustee of the patient charity Action for Pulmonary Fibrosis and is the clinical lead for the James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership.