Professor Chris Scotton

About me:

Chris studied Natural Sciences in Cambridge before embarking on a PhD at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) in London. His work on chemokines and their receptors in ovarian cancer was focused on the recruitment of immune cell subsets into the tumour microenvironment, but lead to the first observation that ovarian cancer cells might also use this as a mechanism for metastasis.

In 2002, Chris was awarded a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship and spent two wonderful years in Milan at the Mario Negri Pharmacology Research Institute, working on innate immunity and monocyte/macrophage polarisation and transcriptomics. On returning to the UK in 2004, Chris took a segue into lung research working with Prof Rachel Chambers and the late Prof Geoff Laurent at UCL Respiratory, with a focus on interstitial lung diseases, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in particular. Like many people, Chris had never before heard of IPF, but rapidly came to realise the true importance of working to understand this incurable disease - which currently accounts for >1% of all UK deaths. His research at UCL focused on innate immunity, coagulation and the cell/molecular biology of epithelial-fibroblast interactions; this was supported by career development fellowships from first the British Lung Foundation and subsequently the MRC. Chris moved from his role as a Principal Research Fellow at UCL to take up a Senior Lectureship in Exeter in 2014, and subsequently Associate Professor in 2021. He currently co-leads the Respiratory Medicine research group in the College of Medicine & Health in close collaboration with Prof Michael Gibbons, Consultant Respiratory Physician at the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital and Director of the Peninsula Clinical Research Network and Dr Anne-Marie Russell (Senior Lecturer in CMH).

In his spare time, Chris was also the Chairperson of the British Association for Lung Research (http://www.balr.co.uk) from 2017 - 2021, has sat on the science & research committees of the British Lung Foundation and the British Thoracic Society, and is currently on the research review panel for Action for Pulmonary Fibrosis, plus an Associate Editor of Thorax.

Interests:

Chris and the team's research interests are wide-ranging, because almost everything in translational research is exciting! With a core focus on the pathogenesis (and treatment) of interstitial lung diseases, the Respiratory Medicine group is currently trying to unravel the complex interactions between innate immune cells (particularly macrophage immunometabolism), lung epithelium and fibroblasts using a variety of in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo model systems - including cutting-edge imaging technologies such as microCT and multiphoton microscopy. The group also has a keen interest in the genetics underpinning the development of lung diseases, with recent work utilising Mendelian randomisation to infer causal features of IPF and COPD using data from UK Biobank. Multi-disciplinarity is a key feature - the group works closely with exercise physiologists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians to explore novel technologies which can be brought to bear in diagnosing or treating lung disease.

As our group grows, our research portfolio has expanded to include interstitial lung disease, COPD, bronchiectasis, asthma and obstructive sleep apnoea. The overarching emphasis is on improving the clinical management of patients, be it through novel pharmacological strategies or diagnostics. In pursuit of this, Dr Anna Duckworth (PhD student extraordinaire) was instrumental in setting up our bespoke patient involvement group - the Exeter Patients in Collaboration for pulmonary fibrosis research (EPIC) - who have helped guide (and mandate) our research endeavours. You can read a little more about EPIC here.

A brief overview of some of our research is in the videos below, filmed at the Living Systems Institute Symposium in March 2016.

[embed:39]

[embed:65]

Qualifications:

• BA(hons), University of Cambridge
• MA, University of Cambridge
• PhD, Cancer Research UK
• Professional Certificate in Academic Practice
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy