Leading Preventive Medicine and Public Health researchers
Professor Sir Nicholas Wald
Professor Sir Nicholas Wald FRS, Director, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, pioneered the field of antenatal screening for congenital malformation and made discoveries that form the basis of screening for neural tube defects and Down’s syndrome in early pregnancy. Recent research activities include screening and treatment for Heliocobacter pylori infection and subsequent stomach cancer, and screening and treatment of hypothyroidism in pregnancy. He is the innovator of the ‘Polypill’, a radical approach to the prevention of cardiovascular disease, for which trials are being developed.
Dr Anne Szarewski
Dr Anne Szarewski, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, leads research to study different markers for cervical screening, and also two HPV vaccine trials. Her team has developed two preventative vaccines that have shown great promise in clinical trials: one containing HPV types 16 and 18; the other containing types 6 and 11 in addition to 16 and 18.
Dr David Wald MA MBBS MRCP MD Senior Lecturer and Consultant Cardiologist Dr David Wald is an Interventional Cardiologist with an interest in the prevention of cardiovascular disease. His clinical-academic aims are to bridge the interventional and preventive approaches to cardiovascular disease which are often viewed as distinct. He is co-ordinating a proposed randomised trial to assess the value of coronary angioplasty in preventing future coronary heart disease events among patients receiving angioplasty to treat an acute myocardial infarction.
Professor Jack Cuzick
Professor Jack Cuzick, PhD Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine Professor Cuzick has pioneered the field of chemoprevention of breast cancer. The IBIS I and IBIS II trials have been investigating first tamoxifen and then anastrozole for prophylactic treatment of breast cancer. He has more recently lead the introduction of aromatase inhibitors, both for the treatment of breast cancer where they represent a major advantage over tamoxifen, and as a better agent for chemoprevention.
Professor Peter Sasieni
Professor Peter Sasieni, an acknowledged expert in survival analysis, has extended his work in steering the cervical screening programme in the UK to playing a leading role in clinical trials of HPV testing both in the UK and Peru. He is the Director of the Clinical Trials Prevention Unit, recently established as the only unit specialising in cancer screening prevention.