Professor Manu Shankar-Hari has recently joined the University of Edinburgh as the new Chair of Translational Critical Care Medicine and Honorary Consultant in Intensive Care Medicine. Image Academic Background Manu trained in Intensive Care Medicine in London, completed MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and did his PhD in Immunology at the Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology at King's College London, UK. He was appointed as a consultant physician in Intensive Care Medicine at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in 2009. He was awarded the NIHR Clinician Scientist Fellowship in 2016 to investigate the long-term health consequences of sepsis survivors and to undertake a clinical trial of vaccinating to reduce long-term health care burden in adult sepsis survivors, the VACIRiSS Trial. Manu is the Chief Investigator of the TRAITS Programme which aims to provide time-critical precision medicine for hospitalised adults with acute illness. The TRAITS Programme Critical illness is a global health challenge (6 billion critically ill in 2010). The short-term mortality of critical illness is high, and the longer-term sequelae for survivors and their families are stark. This epidemiology is applicable to ~11,000 adults per year admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) in Scotland. Currently, there is no precision medicine for the critically ill. Key contributing factors include the logistic challenges of delivering near patient biomarkers or tests to enable identification of treatable traits in critically ill patients and the sophistication of the trial design required (such as adaptive randomised controlled trials). The TRAITS Programme uses a new and efficient clinical trial design that can test multiple treatments matched to the individual ICU patient’s biological features. These biological features, in response to a particular illness will differ for each patient, as each individual patient's response to a particular illness is unique. Providing treatments to illnesses which take account of individual patient’s biological features is called Precision Medicine. The TRAITS Programme will allow clinicians to measure the biological responses to treatments in real-time, which is globally unique. The programme goals are to find one or more new treatments that can reduce deaths in ICU patients, whilst discovering new treatment targets, new traits and the biological features associated with particular treatments that provide the most benefit. The TRAITS Programme is a Scotland wide ICU precision medicine programme, one of the first precision medicine grants awarded globally. Professor Manu Shankar-HariThe TRAITS Programme Contact Manu Publication date 11 May, 2022
