Scientific Advisors

Frank is Senior Vice President of Research at Isis Pharmaceuticals. He is responsible for preclinical antisense drug discovery research. Dr. Bennett is one of the founding members of the company. He has been involved in the development of antisense oligonucleotides as therapeutic agents, including research on the application of oligonucleotides for inflammatory and cancer targets, oligonucleotide delivery and pharmacokinetics. He also runs the company's antisense mechanism program which is focused on the development of RNase H, RNAi, micro-RNA and splicing. Frank has published more than 90 papers in the field of antisense research and development and has more than 100 issued U.S. patents. Prior to joining Isis , he was Associate Senior Investigator in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology at Smith Kline and French Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline (currently, GlaxoSmithKline). Frank received his B.S. degree in Pharmacy from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico and his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas . Frank performed his postdoctoral research in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology at Smith Kline and French Laboratories, where he studied the signal transduction pathway of leukotrienes.

William is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine, Head of the Allergy and Clinical Immunology Section, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He received his medical degree from the University of Wisconsin, interned at Cincinnati General Hospital, and was a resident and fellow at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. He is Board certified in Allergy and Immunology and Internal Medicine and specializes in Allergy and Immunology. William’s medical and research interests include anaphylaxis, asthma, exercise-induced asthma, inflammation, and virus-induced airway hyper-reactivity. Recently, he was named Director of the National Institutes of Health sponsored General Clinical Research Center of the University of Wisconsin Medical School. He currently heads a six-year U.S. Department of Health and Human Services project examining the biological and environmental mechanisms that put inner-city children at higher risk for severe asthma than children living outside urban areas. William is a past President of the conjoint American Board of Allergy and Immunology. He is also past President of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI). He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Allergy. He is a member of the Advisory Council of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. William is the author of more than 150 scientific articles and more than 100 chapters, books and invited papers. He is one of the authors of Allergy: Principles and Practices, and, with Dr. Stephen Holgate, Asthma and Rhinitis. He has been a fellow of the AAAAI since 1973.

Stephen qualified in Medicine at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, London, in 1971. After completing his postgraduate training in London (1974) the Robert Brigham Hospital and Harvard Medical School (1980), he established a research group at Southampton University focused on the causes and treatment of asthma and related airway disorders.

His research interests have included the role of mast cells and other inflammatory cells in asthma, the viral cause of acute exacerbations and the role of the airway epithelium in orchestrating persistent inflammation and remodeling in chronic disease. This included the identification of ADAM33 as the first novel asthma susceptibility gene, the role of air pollutants in asthma and the discovery of a deficiency in primary interferons underlying virus-induced exacerbations. He has published over 880 peer-reviewed papers on asthma, was co-editor of Clinical and Experimental Allergy for 25 years and has been co-editor of many books including Allergy: (three editions) and Asthma and Rhinitis and Elliot Middleton’s Allergy: Principles and Practice. He was appointed an UK Medical Research Council Clinical Professor in 1987.

His awards include the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine (1999), the University of Gent Gold Medal for research (2004) and the Royal Society of Medicine’s Ellison-Cliffe medal (2004). He was President of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology (1990-2003), President of the British Thoracic (2007), Member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (2002-2008), Chairman (1987-2003) and then was reappointed as Member of the UK governments’ Committee on Medical Effects of Air Pollutants as a Member (1992-2003), then Chairman (2004-2008) of the Expert Panel on Air Quality Standards and is currently Chairman of the UK government’s Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances. He was co-founder and is now President of the National Allergy Strategy Group to promote improved clinical allergy services in the UK, co-founder of the All Party Parliamentry Group on Allergy, Chairman of the Science in Health Group of the UK Science Council (2004-present) and the Population and Systems Medicine Board at the MRC and is also a Member of the MRC Strategy Board (2007-present). He was a Member and now Honorary Member of the Association of the Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland and is an overseas Member of the American Association of Physicians (2005) and Member of Council of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. He was the Robert A. Cooke Memorial Lecturer at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology’s Annual Meeting in 1995 and 2000 and is an AAAAI Honorary Fellow. In 2008, he received the Paul Ehrlich Award for Research from the European Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Clinical Immunology, is Secretary General of the Collegium International Allergologicum (2007-2009) and is a Member of the Board of Directors of the World Allergy Organization (2007-present).

Marc is Professor at the South Paris University in Clamart, France. In addition to his academic responsibilities, Marc Humbert is consultant and specialist at the National Reference Centre for Pulmonary Hypertension and Severe Asthma Clinic, Department of Respiratory and Intensive Care Medicine, Hospital Antoine Béclère, Clamart, France. Marc Humbert is Chairman of the South Paris Pulmonary Hypertension Centre for Research and Care (CTRS INSERM), Director of the INSERM Team "Cytokines, Chemokines and Pulmonary Inflammation", Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Comité National contre les Maladies Respiratoires, Member of the South Paris University Medical Committee, Vice Dean of the South Paris School of Medicine, Editor in Chief of the European Respiratory Review, Associate Editor of Allergy and of the European Respiratory Journal, and Member of the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. He has published widely in the fields of asthma, pulmonary hypertension and pulmonary inflammation.

Sally is Professor of Medicine and Director, Asthma and Allergy Center, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA. After receiving her bachelor of science and medical degrees from the University of Florida, she received her Fellowship in Pulmonary Medicine from the Medical College of Virginia in 1986. Sally is an expert in severe asthma and her laboratory is interested in pathobiologic mechanisms of severe asthma. Her clinical interests focus on identifying asthma phenotypes to better understand their immunopathology, genetics, and to facilitate the development of biomarkers. Her bench research interests encompass 3 areas: 1) cellular responses to IL-13 and TGF-ß. 2) distal lung inflammation/repair in asthma and 3) adaptive and innate interactions in the epithelium. In addition, Sally is involved in a number of clinical trials examining the safety and efficacy of new asthma treatments. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, Sally was a professor of medicine at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. She also held the Drs. Mary and Harold Zirin Chair in Pulmonary Biology and served as director of the Weinberg Clinical Research Unit. Sally is past Chair of the Program Planning Committee Section on Allergy, Immunology, and Inflammation of the American Thoracic Society (ATS), and past Chair of the International Conference Committee of ATS. She is a member of a number of other organizations including ATS, the Western Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Academy of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology (AAAAI); the European Respiratory Society; and was made Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians in 1992, and the AAAAI in 2001. She has served as an advisor to the Pulmonary Allergy section of the FDA. She currently serves on the internal Board of Scientific Counsellors for the National Institute of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Her career contributions to the medical literature include more than 350 peer-reviewed articles, publications, scientific presentations and lectures at numerous national and international symposia. She has been a peer reviewer for such professional publications as CHEST, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the European Respiratory Journal, the Journal of Asthma, the Journal of Immunology and the International Archives of Allergy and Immunology. She is a contributing editor to the Annals of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology, a deputy editor for the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine and on the editorial board of Clinical and Experimental Allergy.