Crafoord Academy Lecture 2018

Lessons for the 21st century from medical pioneers in the “mists of time”? – the Crafoord Academy Lecture 2018 with Iain McInnes, University of Glasgow, UK.

Lessons for the 21st century from medical pioneers in the “mists of time”?

Iain McInnes, Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. Welcome remarks by Olle Kämpe, the Crafoord Prize Committee for Polyarthritis and Anders Bengtsson, Lund University.

Modern medicine is built on the exploits and imagination of remarkable pioneers who faced seemingly insurmountable clinical problems a century ago, yet delivered remarkable advances to transform health care. We now live longer, and with more quality than at any time in history. There is, however, much work to be done. Using inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, as exemplars, I shall speculate on what our medical forebears might do now, were they facing the medical challenges of the 21st century, but were also in receipt of the extraordinary fusion of molecular medicine and big data science. How would they deliver the next step change in medical progress.

Iain McInnes is a leader of numerous multi-centre clinical trial and pathogenesis investigation programmes in inflammatory arthritis at the international level. He is immediate past chairman of the Foreum (Foundation for European Rheumatology Research) Scientific Committee, leads the European Roadmap programme that is defining the research agenda for European rheumatology for the next decade and is President-elect of EULAR. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences.