Biography

Professor Sejal Saglani leads the Paediatric Severe Asthma Group within the section of Inflammation, Repair and Development at Imperial College London. She is consultant in Paediatric Respiratory Medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital and part of the Paediatric Difficult Asthma Team.

Professor Saglani studied and qualified in medicine at the University of Leicester before completing clinical specialist training in respiratory paediatrics. Funded by Asthma UK, she studied her postgraduate degree at the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), focusing on the pathology of severe infant and pre-school wheeze. For this, she received the NHLI’s best thesis prize.

After clinical specialist training, Prof Saglani received a British Lung Foundation Research Fellowship to develop an experimental model of allergic asthma and, following this, a Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellowship to investigate the mechanisms mediating the onset of pre-school wheeze and asthma in early life. Professor Saglani has since been awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) New Investigator Award, and currently has a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Career Development Fellowship.

She was awarded the European Respiratory Society Young Investigator Award for Paediatric Research in 2009, and The European Respiratory Society Romain Pauwels Award for Excellence in Translational Respiratory Research in 2015.

Areas of expertise and research interests

Professor Saglani’s clinical expertise and research interests include:

• management of pre-school children with recurrent wheezing
• management of school age children with difficult asthma
• factors predicting progression of pre-school wheeze to school-age asthma
• the identification of novel therapies for pre-school wheeze and childhood severe asthma

Professor Saglani has established a translational research programme. It involves an integrated approach using airway samples from children and direct application and clinical translation of her findings in interventional clinical trials.

Publications

Saglani S, Gregory LG, Manghera AK, Branchett WJ, Uwadiae F, Entwistle LJ, Oliver RA, Vasiliou JE, Sherburn R, Lui S, Puttur F, Vöhringer D, Walker SA, Buckley J, Grychtol R, Fainardi V, Denney L, Byrne A, von Mutius E, Bush A, Lloyd CM. Inception of early-life allergen-induced airway hyperresponsiveness is reliant on IL-13+CD4+ T cells. Sci Immunol 2018 Sep 7;3(27)

Andersson C, Adams A, Nagakumar P, Bossley CJ, Gupta A, De Vries D, Adna A, Bush A, Lloyd CM*, Saglani S*. Intra-epithelial neutrophils in paediatric severe asthma are associated with better lung function. J Allergy Clin Immunol 2017;139:1819-1829

Bossley CJ, Fleming L, Ullmann N, Gupta A, Adams A, Nagakumar P, Bush A, Saglani S. Assessment of corticosteroid response in pediatric patients with severe asthma by using a multidomain approach. J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016;138:413-420.

Castro-Rodriguez JA, Saglani S, Rodriguez-Martinez CE, et al.Castro-Rodriguez JA, Saglani S, Rodriguez-Martinez CE, Oyarzun MA, Fleming L, Bush A close, 2018, The relationship between inflammation and remodeling in childhood asthma: A systematic review, Pediatric Pulmonology, Vol:53, ISSN:8755-6863, Pages:824-835

Saglani S, Rosenthal M, Bush A, 2018, Should oral corticosteroids be prescribed for preschool viral wheeze?, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Vol:6, ISSN:2213-2600, Pages:E21-E21