Biography

Dr Louise Fleming completed her undergraduate degree in medicine at the University of Manchester before moving to London for clinical training in paediatrics, which included an 18-month fellowship placement in The Gambia.

She continued her post-graduate research at Royal Brompton Hospital and the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London. This research was funded by the British Lung Foundation under the supervision of Professor Andrew Bush and Dr Nicola Wilson. She carried out a randomised controlled trial investigating the use of inflammatory markers to guide management in children with severe asthma leading to the award of an MD.

She completed her clinical training in the allergy department at St Mary’s Hospital and in 2011, she was appointed honorary consultant at Royal Brompton Hospital and clinical senior lecturer at the National Heart and Lung Institute. In 2020, Dr Fleming was promoted to reader at the National Heart and Lung Institute.

Areas of expertise

Dr Louise Fleming is an honorary consultant in respiratory medicine with a special interest in children with problematic severe asthma and pre-school wheeze. 

Her clinical expertise includes: 

• paediatric respiratory medicine

• problematic severe asthma

• pre-school wheeze

• clinical trials.

Experience

Dr Fleming has developed the difficult asthma protocol and the team at Royal Brompton Hospital. The difficult asthma team is a tertiary and quaternary referral service for children with problematic severe asthma. 

She set up the national registry for children with difficult asthma and chairs the paediatric difficult asthma network, which aims to establish a unified protocol for the assessment of children with problematic severe asthma across the UK. 

She is also a member of the BTS Specialist Advisory Group for severe asthma and of the BTS/SIGN asthma guideline group.

Research

Dr Fleming’s research interests include:

• distinguishing difficult from severe therapy-resistant asthma
• phenotyping severe asthma
• the use of biomarkers in asthma and pre-school wheeze
• non-drug interventions for problematic severe asthma
• targeted treatment for asthma and pre-school wheeze.

She also runs clinical trials for novel therapeutics for severe asthma. 

Dr Fleming has been a member of the U-BIOPRED (unbiased biomarkers for the prediction of respiratory disease outcomes) consortium since 2008. This is an IMI funded Europe-wide study recruiting adults and children with severe asthma. She is also a member of the asthma consortium of the respiratory biomedical research unit (rBRU) at Royal Brompton Hospital.

Teaching

Dr Fleming has been an invited speaker at national and international conferences including the European Respiratory Society Congress. 

She teaches on the Imperial College London allergy MSc course and is a personal tutor for Imperial College medical undergraduates.

Publications

Dr Fleming has been published in journals such as Thorax, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.