Translational genomics in critical care medicine.

Respiratory viruses that cause diseases like Covid and influenza are likely to continue to cause life-threatening illness in humans for the foreseeable future. There is a pressing need to find new treatments, and also to build efficient pipelines to find new treatments for each new disease that emerges. Studying the genomes of people who become critically ill has already led to promising new treatments in Covid - I will continue this work in Covid and influenza. My aim is to use genetics to generate and refine therapeutic hypotheses - that is, to identify drugs that might prevent death or critical illness. And then, I aim to create an effective model system to test those hypotheses in critically-ill humans: by giving doses of drug into tiny sections of their lungs, using a bronchoscope, and then to measure the effects on lung function and appearance.