Dr David Hunt awarded drug safety prize by the MHRA
Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellow is awarded Sir Derrick Dunlop Prize by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency: September 2015
Dr David Hunt, a Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellow based at the IGMM, has been awarded the Sir Derrick Dunlop Prize by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for his contribution to drug safety.
The Dunlop Prize was awarded at a special conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the Yellow Card Scheme at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. The prize is named in honour of Sir Derrick Dunlop, who established the Yellow Card Scheme in 1964 and recognises a clinician who has made an important contribution to drug safety through reporting. The award was in recognition of Dr Hunt’s role in identifying the link between recombinant interferon-beta therapy and a potentially fatal disease of small blood vessels called thrombotic microangiopathy. The identification of this serious adverse drug reaction led to the European wide implementation of measures to reduce risk to patients.
Dr Hunt is a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellow and works with Professor Andrew Jackson at the MRC Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Dr Hunt’s lab studies how innate immune activation and interferon cause brain damage in autoimmune diseases and his findings were published earlier in the year in the New England Journal of Medicine.