John Iredale - Biography#

In 1985 Iredale graduated in medicine from the University of Southampton UK with honours and a Clinical distinction, one of only two students in his year to achieve this. He developed his research and academic career through a series of highly prestigious externally funded MRC Fellowships including: MRC training Fellowship (1991-1994), Clinician Scientist fellowship (1994-1998) and Senior Clinical Fellowship (1998-2003).

His work on the innate immune response and the development of fibrosis has, over the last two decades, demonstrated that it is reversible in many organs; observations that have unlocked significant investment by Pharma and research funders to understanding the basic mechanisms underpinning fibrosis with the aim of designing anti-fibrotic therapies. Latterly his group has identified a key role for macrophages in fibrosis resolution and identified the hitherto elusive macrophage associated with and fibrosis resolution. This discovery has led directly to the deployment of cell based therapies and the identification of relaxin as a potential antifibrotic (currently undergoing clinical evaluation).

To underpin this work he has a lifetime grant income in excess of £50M; he has played a very significant role in the development of clinical academic training for medical, dental and veterinary graduates (see part 4.1). His training expertise has been sought by British, European and US groups.

He is a ministerially appointed member of MRC Council; a medical trustee of the British Heart Foundation; the Children's Liver Disease Foundation; the Foundation for Liver Research; and is chairman of the CRUK Beatson Institute in Glasgow. Iredale was invited to chair Main Panel A (health and life sciences) in the forthcoming Research Evaluation Framework 2021 (REF2021, the six yearly peer review of every UK higher education institute). Iredale has published extensively on tissue fibrosis including papers in the Nature journals, Science, Immunity, JCI etc two of Iredale's papers have been cited more than 1000 times. His publications have over 20,000 citations in total and his H-index is 75.