Profile
Dr Emma Magavern is a Clinical Lecturer and a Clinical Pharmacology and Internal Medicine doctor. She completed her PhD in pharmacogenomics at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, working with Professor Sir Mark Caulfield and Professor Damian Smedley. She has now been appointed a NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer, splitting her time between 50% clinical work and 50% academic work. She completed a BA in English prior to her MD and subsequent MScs in Bioethics and Genomics. Through training in clinical medicine, humanities, genetics, and pharmacology she has developed an interest in the scientific merits, clinical potential and implementation challenges of pharmacogenomics. She was co-secretary of the Royal College of Physicians/British Pharmacological Society (BPS) working group on pharmacogenomics and led the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) cardiovascular pharmacotherapy working group (CVP) pharmacogenomics position paper. She is part of the newly appointed NHS England Network of Excellence for Pharmacogenomics and a co-lead for the pharmacogenomics section of the Health Education England GeNotes initiative. Her main focus is on leveraging genomic medicine to reduce existing health inequalities. She is also a nucleus member of the ESC CVP and the chair of the BPS SpR Committee.
Research
Medicines do not work well or have side effects for many people who try them. Some of the reason for this variability in medication response is due to common variants in DNA. Large scale research on populations has shown that all of us will have at least one variant in our DNA that would change the approach to medicines use if we needed a specific medicine. Therefore, if we know who has these DNA variants, we can prescribe medicine in a more personalised way avoiding a trial-and-error approach. This can make medicines safer by reducing bad reactions to medications and improving how medicines work for people. My work is focused on understanding more about how and why people with different variants in DNA respond differently to medications. For this field of work to benefit patients the public need to know about this topic and tell the health care teams how we should use this practically in clinical settings in the NHS to benefit patients. Therefore, my work is also focused on communicating with patients and the public about this area of science, curating patient and prescriber information resources, and surveying patient attitudes, concerns, and needs.
Sponsors
My work is supported by Barts Charity and the Barts NIHR Biomedical Research Centre as well as the NHS England Pharmacogenomics Network of Excellence and Genomics England.
Teaching
Dr Magavern teaches for a number of Genomics MSc courses in and around London, including QMUL, Imperial and Cambridge. She is also involved in teaching pharmacology and pharmacogenomics to undergraduate and postgraduate doctors and other health care practitioners.
