Brendan Whittle
Prof Brendan J. Whittle, B.Pharm., Ph.D., D.Sc., HonF.BPhS., HonM.FinPhS
Brendan Whittle has been a Director of the Company since 1996 and is also Professor Emeritus of Applied Pharmacology in Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London. He is Visiting Professor of both the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Tampere, Finland. In addition to his three academic degrees, he is an Honorary Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and Honorary Member of the Finnish Pharmacological Society.
He joined the WHRI after some 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry, latterly as Director of Pharmacology, and is still actively involved as a pharmaceutical scientific consultant. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed scientific papers and reviews, while the Institute of Scientific Information has nominated him as one of the world's 100 most-cited scientists based on his publications over a 20 year period. He has also won numerous prestigious scientific awards.
His research areas have included studies on the gastro-intestinal tract, particularly in relation to the adverse effects of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Such work has significant potential to understand and hence alleviate the associated gut damage, a major clinical problem still to be resolved. His work on colitis has identified new inflammatory mediators and processes that underlie this debilitating disease. He has found that a well-established class of anti-colitic agents that includes mesalamine promotes the colonic expression of an endogenous anti-oxidant protective system, identifying a novel mechanism for this old but still clinically effective drug.
His work also concerns pulmonary arterial hypertension, a devastating and often fatal disease involving pulmonary vascular occlusion. He holds a number of patents in this area and led the early identification, selection and development of a highly effective prostacyclin analogue. This compound was subsequently developed into a number of pharmaceutical preparations and is now one of the key therapies for this often-fatal disease. His ongoing collaborative work has identified the profile of receptors that are activated by clinically used prostacyclin-like agents, and is currently working on the complex pharmacological mechanisms underlying the adverse pulmonary vascular cell proliferation in this disease.
He is closely involved in many aspects of research and development of novel drugs in collaboration with a number of international pharmaceutical companies, and brings this expertise to WHRL.
