Peter Howarth

Biography

Professor Peter Howarth is Professor of Allergy and Respiratory Medicine and Honorary Consultant Physician within Medicine at the University of Southampton. Professor Peter Howarth is Professor of Allergy and Respiratory Medicine and Honorary Consultant Physician with a clinical and research focus on asthma, particularly severe asthma, and allergy. He is Head of the Clinical Studies Forum in the Clinical and Experimental Science (CES) Research division within the Faculty of Medicine, coordinating clinical and translational human based research as well as clinical trials, lead for “Airways disease” within the CES research division and area lead for “Airways disease” within the NIH funded Respiratory Bioscience Research Unit in Southampton. Professor Howarth has funding from the MRC, National Institute of Health Research, EPSRC and Asthma UK as well as Industrial funding for his research that addresses the understanding and treatment of severe asthma. Much of this work makes use of direct airway sampling at bronchoscopy to obtain samples for the evaluation of the airway microbiome, airway inflammatory status, airway remodelling and to obtain samples for ex vivo cell culture studies. Such studies focus, in collaboration, on bronchial epithelial cells, airway mucosal fibroblasts and alveolar macrophages. These approaches have been used both to compare findings in severe asthma to that in healthy controls and mild asthma as well as to evaluate the impact of standard and novel therapeutic approaches to disease management.

Research Interest

My research is focused on the pathophysiology and pharmacology of airways disease This research is aimed at better understanding the pathophysiology of clinical disease expression, the impact of current and novel therapies on the disease process and the identification of biomarkers to aid in diagnosis, disease monitoring and in early phase clinical trials as surrogate end-points.