Immune-Mediated Inflammatory Disease Forum

Steering Committee

Professor Iain McInnes

Vice Principal and Head of College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences (MVLS)

University of Glasgow, UK

Iain McInnes is Head of College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences, and Vice Principal, University of Glasgow, and serves also as the Muirhead Professor of Medicine and Versus Arthritis Professor of Rheumatology in the University.

He is Director of the Versus Arthritis Centre of Excellence for Inflammatory Arthritis, lead from the University of Glasgow that includes Universities of Oxford, Newcastle and Birmingham. He serves as a member of the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board. He is a Trustee on the Board of Versus Arthritis. He is past chairman of the Foreum (Foundation for European Rheumatology Research) Scientific Committee, lead the European Roadmap programme that is defining the research agenda for European rheumatology for the next decade and is Past-President of the European Alliance of Rheumatology Associations (EULAR). Under these auspices he led the creation of the first pan-European Rheumatology Research Centre launched in 2021.

His work is mainly focused upon the understanding of the pathogenesis of immune mediated inflammatory diseases and encompasses basic discovery immunology through phase 1 and proof of concept experimental medicine clinical trials to leadership of pivotal phase 3 trials in the area of immune biology. His laboratory group performed original discovery work supporting the therapeutic targeting of a several inflammatory cytokines.

More recently he has focused on the biology of myeloid cells in the pathogenesis of a number of immune diseases. He has served on a number of scientific advisory groups adjacent to the pharmaceutical industry, mainly in the area of development of novel immune modifying agents. He has published >550 peer-reviewed original and review articles with an h-index of >130 equating to around 100,000 citations. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2019 by HM Queen Elizabeth II.

Professor Tim Orchard

Consultant Gastroenterologist and appointed Chief Executive

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, UK

Professor Tim Orchard is Chief Executive of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, a trust consisting of five hospitals including three major teaching hospitals. The trust has 15 000 staff and a turnover of £1.6 billion, and provides acute, specialist and community services in North West London. He is also a Consultant Gastroenterologist and Professor of Gastroenterology at Imperial College London. He has had significant leadership and management roles including running the Division of Medicine and Integrated Care, and acting as Medical Director at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. He has overseen a number of transformational projects in the trust and is working with colleagues across London to plan effective services for the needs of the future population.

He qualified from the University of Cambridge and London University before undertaking training in internal medicine and gastroenterology. He undertook research at the University of Oxford with Professor Derek Jewell, and has continued his research interests in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and extra-intestinal manifestations (EIMs). More recently he has been working with colleagues to examine the role of metabonomics in relation to IBD and the microbes in the gut, and has developed an interest in IBD in the large South Asian population in West London. He has published papers on phenotype determining genes and EIMs in IBD, urinary metabonomics and other aspects of IBD and written a number of book chapters. He has also been involved in a number of clinical trials of novel drug therapies in IBD in their population of secondary and tertiary IBD patients. He has contributed to international guidelines on IBD and on EIMs associated with IBD; and to NICE guidelines on spondyloarthritis in the UK.

Professor Orchard has previously been the Emanoel Lee Junior Research Fellow at St Cross College, University of Oxford, the Sidney Truelove Lecturer at the University of Oxford, the Archibald Clark Kennedy Lecturer at Corpus Christi College Cambridge, and has delivered a keynote address at the London Business School. He has been Chair of the British Society of Gastroenterology IBD Section, and a national representative to the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation, as well as chairing the BSG IBD Clinical Studies Group. He also has a particular interest in education and training, and was previously Director of Clinical Studies at St Mary’s Hospital, London, still regularly teaching clinical medical students, and was previously joint training programme director for gastroenterology in North West Thames.

Professor Silvio Danese

Professor of Gastroenterology, Head of Gastroenterology and Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Unit

Vita-Salute San Raffaele University and IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital, Milan

Doctor David T. Rubin

Joseph B Kirsner Professor In Medicine

The University of Chicago Medicine, USA

Dr David T. Rubin is the Joseph B. Kirsner Professor of Medicine and a Professor of Pathology, Chief of the Section of Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition and the Co-Director of the Digestive Diseases Centre at The University of Chicago Medicine. He also currently serves as an Associate faculty member at the MacLean Centre for Clinical Medical Ethics, an Associate Investigator at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Centre and is a member of the University of Chicago Committee on Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacogenomics. He is the former Chair of the National Scientific Advisory Committee of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, where he also serves as a Board of Trustees member. He is the deputy chair of the Executive Committee of the International Organization for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

Dr Rubin is a Fellow of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG), the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE), the American College of Physicians (ACP), and the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh). He is on the Board of Trustees for the ACG.

Among numerous awards and honours, Dr Rubin was chosen by his peers as a member of Best Doctors (recognized for superior clinical ability) and America’s Top Physicians (gastroenterology). Additionally, he twice received the ACG’s Governor’s Award of Excellence in Clinical Research (2003 and 2013), and the UChicago Postgraduate Teaching Award in recognition of significant contributions for fellowship education (2006). In 2012, he received the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation’s Rosenthal Award, a national leadership award bestowed upon a volunteer who has contributed in an indisputable way to the quality of life of patients and families. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Gastroenterology and Editor-in-Chief of the ACG On-Line Education Universe. In 2020, Dr Rubin received the Sherman Prize for Excellence in Crohn’s and Colitis.

Dr Rubin is an editor of a best-selling book Curbside Consultation in IBD which is now in its 3rd edition, was an Associate Editor of the 11th edition and is senior editor of the upcoming 12th edition of Sleisenger and Fordtran’s Gastrointestinal and Liver Disease, and an author or coauthor of over 500 articles on treatment and management of IBD, cancer in IBD and novel paradigms, as well as the first author of the 2019 ACG Guidelines for ulcerative colitis. His current research is in the area of novel approaches to monitoring of IBD (wearables and point of care intestinal ultrasound), prevention of progressive complications from uncontrolled inflammation, and a variety of collaborative and translational studies related to the causes of IBD and its complications.