DavidKavanagh Newcastle Upon TyneUnited Kingdom

David Kavanagh is the Professor of Complement Therapeutics at the National Renal Complement Therapeutics Centre (NRCTC). He graduated in Medicine and Immunology from the University of Glasgow in 1998 and obtained his PhD from Newcastle University in 2006. He subsequently undertook a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis and a Kidney Research UK Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. For his work defining the role of complement in aHUS, he was awarded the Renal Association’s Young Investigator award. David moved to Newcastle to start his own lab in 2008 with a Wellcome Trust Fellowship to continue his work on complement mediated renal diseases. In addition, David is chief investigator on several clinical trials of novel complement therapeutics in C3G and aHUS. More recently David has also focused on the genetics of the complement system in the eye. David was academic founder of Gyroscope Therapeutics which is using gene therapy to treat Age Related Macular Degeneration, the commonest cause of blindness in the developed world. This therapy is based on his finding of the causative role of complement factor I haploinsufficiency in disease pathogenesis. Gyroscope therapeutics was recently acquired by Novartis following initial clinical trials.