Dr. Peter Openshaw

  • Dr Openshaw is trained in Medicine at Guy’s Hospital and was awarded the Treasurer’s Gold Medal in Medicine. After SHO (Brompton, Turner-Warwick; Guy’s, Renal), and registrar posts (Hammersmith Hospital and Ealing), I became SR then Consultant at St Mary’s. My clinical work now comprises general outpatients and occasional ward cover, but I have maintained my role as a personal tutor and run weekly tutorials for medical students, give lectures on immunology, vaccination and lung diseases, co-ordinate a BSc module and teach regularly on other courses.
  • Dr Openshaw was among the first 100 elected Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999). Scientifically, my greatest contribution has been to show the importance of host immune responses in not only defeating infection but also in causing disease. When the concept of Th1/2 subsets of CD4 T cells emerged in 1986/7, I applied this to the mouse model of RSV infection and showed that these distinctions were also relevant to viral disease. During a sabbatical at DNAX, California USA, I developed the newly described technique of intracellular cytokine analysis by FACS and applied it to cultured cells, leading to my most cited paper (J Exp Med, 1995; cited 352 times so far). This technique has become an immunological classic. Our detailed comprehensive immunophenotyping of virally infected mice has led to many novel insights, including studies of disease augmentation due to re-infection of neonatally primed mice (J Exp Med 2002) or formalin inactivated vaccines containing carbonyl groups (Nat Med 2006).
  • Dr Openshaw founded the department in 1988 with myself and a technician (funded by my Wellcome Senior Fellowship in Clinical Science). I have succeeded in applications for 4 successive Wellcome programmes over 20 years. We now have 58 members of staff and have brought in more than £15 million in grant funding the past five years.
  • Recently, the major focus has been in recruiting new leaders in and expanding the department.  Johnston, Lalvani, Hussell and Schwarze all developed (or are developing) their careers in my department and now all have personal chairs. The department was rebuilt to our design in 2002 (Wellcome Trust JIF award), and is now renowned internationally as a centre of expertise in viral lung infection.
  • Dr Openshaw is Head of the ‘Respiratory Infections’ section of the National Heart and Lung Institute, a Division of the Faculty of Medicine. I organised and chaired the RSV symposium (Oxford, September 2005), a biennial global conference of ~250 experts. I review regularly for Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology, J Exp Med, The Lancet, BMJ, Vaccine, J Immunol, J Virol, etc and am on 6 Editorial boards. We run the core flow cytometry facility, and I chair the animal facility.
  • Dr Openshaw served on Wellcome Trust’s Clinical Interest Group (1997-2003), Infection and Immunity (2002-2004) and the Tropical and Clinical Panels (2006-2009). I represent the Academy of Medical Sciences on the Science in Heath Group, was on the Academy’s Vaccines Working Group (2005) and sit on the grants award committee of Action Research UK (2004-2007). I became Secretary of the Medical Research Club in 2004. I am on the Board of Supervisors, VIRGO consortium, The Netherlands, 2005-2008 and was invited to join the Special Emphasis Panel, Centres of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance, NIH, USA in July 2006. I became a member of British Society for Immunology’s Council in 2006, and a member of the Department of Health’s Scientific Advisory Group on Pandemic Influenza in December 2007.
  • Dr Openshaw serves on the scientific Advisory Board of Kenta Biotech, Bern, Switzerland (from September 2006). I have acted as consultant to Arrow Therapeutics, Symphogen and other companies.