Lane Fox research programme
The research vision, through the development of cost-effective treatments, is to enhance the long-term outcome of patients with chronic respiratory disease and post critical illness. Professor Nicholas Hart has built the Lane Fox Clinical Respiratory Physiology Research Centre, which hosts a programme of translational physiological research:
- readmission prevention in acute COPD
- prevention of skeletal muscle wasting during acute illness
- clinical trials to improve long-term outcome in sleep disordered breathing and chronic respiratory failure.
Nicholas' research projects have received funding by National Institute of Health Research, Medical Research Council, British Lung Foundation, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity, European Union and a number of industry partners. Since 2007, the total grant income is over £7 million with over £3.5 million in grants as lead applicant or primary supervisor. He is currently primary supervisor to two King’s College London PhD students. Since 2009, he has successfully supervised five King’s College London PhD students (primary supervisor), one University College London PhD student (secondary supervisor) and one Oxford University MD student (secondary supervisor). ne of the previous PhD students has received an NIHR Post-Doctoral Fellowship and an NIHR Clinical Trials Fellowship to continue her work in the Lane Fox Clinical Respiratory Physiology Centre. All this has been achieved whilst delivering as the Clinical Director of the Lane Fox Respiratory Service.
Nicholas is senior author peer-reviewed work published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, American Journal of Respiratory & Critical Care Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, European Respiratory Journal, Thorax, Chest, British Medical Journal Open, Cochrane Review, Journal of Physiology and Critical Care. He was awarded King's College London Readership status for Research and Clinical Excellence in Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine in 2013 and he was awarded his Chair in 2016. He was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Thorax in 2015. Thorax is the 5th highest ranking respiratory journal in the world with an impact factor of 9.655.
Nicholas was appointed as Director of Research Delivery for Guy' and Thomas’ Foundation Trust in 2016 following his previous role as Research and Development Lead for the Division of Peri-Operative, Critical Care, Lane Fox and Pain. Guy’s and Thomas’ has the highest recruitment to NIHR portfolio trials in the UK in 2016/2017 and he is a member of the Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation Trust Research Board of Directors, a group responsible for the research financial activity of the Trust. Nicholas manages the 18 research and development leads and 12 research managers to ensure the research strategy is delivered with the goal of promoting screening, recruitment and retention of patients to NIHR portfolio studies.
Nicholas has developed a technology that has an intellectual property patent in the Europe (US pending) and this has resulted with close collaborative industry links with Philips. He has a master research agreement with Philips to develop and commercialise the Myotrace technology, which involved supervising a signal processing engineer working in the Lane Fox Clinical Respiratory Physiology Research Centre. Nicholas was appointed to the Philips Global Executive Pulmonary Advisory Board in 2014 with a primary role to identify and develop new technologies for respiratory health.