Martin Wilkins MD, FMedSci, DSc

Martin R. Wilkins is a 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. For the past 35 years, he has led a bench-to-bedside program investigating the molecular basis of pulmonary hypertension and evaluating new treatments.

His work, supported throughout by the British Heart Foundation, has contributed to the development of two new classes of drugs for pulmonary hypertension, namely phosphodiesterase inhibitors and soluble guanylate cyclase stimulators. His current work uses genetics, proteomics, and metabolomics to define disease pathways in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension to identify novel druggable targets and personalized medicines.

He is developing a treatment based on inhibition of zinc transport and 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 the president of the Pulmonary Vascular Research Institute, a global network of experts in the field (http://www.pvrinstitute.org).