Kazuhiro ITO

Professor
​​Imperial College London

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Kaz Ito is a veterinary graduate in Japan and had a unique career due to his combination of academia, industry and biotech work experiences. He has been working in Imperial College London (as academic staffs or honorary professor) for 22 years, and his work has ranged from basic/translational science to Drug Discovery and clinical science in respiratory diseases with a particular focus on respiratory infection, inflammation, and premature aging.  He has authored and co-authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and book-chapters including New England Journal of Medicine. In addition to the research work in Sankyo and J&J, Kaz also co-founded 3 biotech working on the identification of new inhaled medicines for respiratory diseases and infection. He is currently conducting respiratory research as a Professor (Principal Research Fellow) of Respiratory Molecular Pharmacology in National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), Imperial College London, and also helping entrepreneurship education and activities in several organizations.

Speech title & Synopsis

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Development of Precision Respiratory Medicine for chronic inflammation and infection

Chronic respiratory diseases, including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and others, are known to be the third leading cause of death responsible for 4 million deaths with as prevalence of 455 million cases globally (in 2019). Current treatments, traditional one-size-fits-all form of medicine, only help to ease discomfort and decrease disease progression with limited impact on lung function and mortality, which are associated with variable clinical effectiveness. Particularly, asthma and COPD are known to be heterogeneous in its molecular and clinical presentation, making it difficult to understand disease aetiology and define robust therapeutic strategies. In addition, respiratory infection and disruption of microbiome are other components to affect clinical manifestation and cause treatment difficulty. Precision medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that considers individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle (defined by NIH), which could more accurately predict the best treatment and prevention strategies for a particular patient.For asthma and COPD, several precision medicines have been launched and used clinically, but many of patients still have not had any benefit from the treatment regimen, and further precision medicines will be required. Novel multi-omics approach and AI driven data processing with large data sets and unstructured data would be useful to identify the target molecule and choose the best treatment. In addition, respiratory infection and microbiome profile have increasingly been recognized as playing an important part in determining disease course and response to treatment, and it should be included in precision models of respiratory medicine. For the development of precision medicine, a major drawback is poor preclinical assay systems, but new systems such as airway-on-chip and organoids will play important roles on precision medicine discovery in future.      In this talk, I will summarize current trends in precision respiratory medicine and future direction and challenge.