Martin Wilkins - Biography#

Martin Wilkins is a physician-scientist with a background in clinical pharmacology.He is the Director of the British Heart Foundation Imperial College Centre of Research Excellence and 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. For the past 25 years he has led a bench-to-bedside programme investigating the molecular basis of pulmonary hypertension and evaluating new treatments. His work, supported throughout by the British Heart Foundation, contributed to the development of two new classes of drug for pulmonary hypertension, namely phosphodiesterase inhibitors and soluble guanylate cyclase stimulators, and has more recently provided insights into the roles of iron and zinc in pulmonary vascular homeostasis. His current work uses genetics, proteomics and metabolomics to define disease pathways in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension with the aim of identifying novel druggable targets and personalised medicines. He was elected to the UK Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. He was awarded a DSc from Imperial College in 2023. He holds a Liebig Professorship at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen (since 2014). He is Past-President of the Pulmonary Vascular Research Institute, a global network of experts in the field (http://www.pvrinstitute.org).