ProfessorMartin Wilkins

Martin R. Wilkins is Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Imperial College London. He is the Director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Imperial Clinical Research Facility at Hammersmith Hospital.

His BHF-funded Travelling Fellowship to St Louis USA in 1987 provided the platform for his subsequent career in cardiovascular research. Over the past 35 years he has built one of the world’s most respected bench‑to‑bedside research programmes in the field, elucidating the molecular basis of pulmonary hypertension and establishing new therapeutic strategies. He uses genetics, proteomics and metabolomics to define disease pathways in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension with the aim of identifying novel druggable targets, improving patient stratification and developing personalising medicines. His work has contributed to the development of two new classes of drug for pulmonary hypertension, namely phosphodiesterase inhibitors and soluble guanylate cyclase stimulators. He has a treatment based on inhibition of zinc transport in early phase clinical trials and is leading a study evaluating the place of Imatinib in the management of pulmonary arterial hypertension using a novel trial design.

He was elected to the UK Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. In 2023 he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree (DSc) from Imperial College and an honorary fellowship from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine. He is Past-President of the Pulmonary Vascular Research Institute, a global network of experts in the field (http://www.pvrinstitute.org).