The Clinical Takeaway: Oral prednisone, asthma and osteoporosis risk

Peter Wark is a senior staff specialist in Respiratory and Sleep Medicine at John Hunter Hospital, Newcastle and a conjoint Professor with the University of Newcastle. He is a senior investigator with the Priority Research Centre for Healthy Lungs at the Hunter Medical Research Institute. He is also a chief investigator in the NHMRC Centre of Excellence in Severe Asthma. His research interests are; airway inflammation in the context of chronic airways disease, innate immunity and the role of infection in chronic airways disease. His group has developed expertise in identifying respiratory viruses in airway secretions and developing an in-vitro cell culture model of the airway epithelium that we use to model the effect of infection and inflammation. His research focuses upon factors that increase susceptibility to virus infection in asthma, COPD, Cystic Fibrosis and bronchiectasis. Characterising airway inflammation and innate immune responses in chronic airways disease and applying this to clinical care, as well as the development of precise individualised management strategies. He is the centre director for the John Hunter Adult Cystic Fibrosis clinic that manages over 100 adult patients with CF in the context of a multidisciplinary team. He works in the severe asthma clinic as well as in general respiratory clinics at John Hunter Hospital and runs indigenous outreach clinics at Narrabri and Moree. He is chairperson for the Hunter New England Local Hospital network respiratory stream, responsible for the provision of respiratory services throughout the Hunter New England area, with a catchment population of 840,000. He is a board member of Cystic Fibrosis Australia. Peter qualified as a Bachelor of Medicine at the University of Newcastle, Australia in 1991. He qualified as a specialist in General and Respiratory and Sleep Medicine and was made a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1999. He was awarded a PhD under the supervision of Professors Peter Gibson and Michael Hensley at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He was made a Fellow of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand in 2017. From 2001-2005 he was a post doctoral research fellow under an NHMRC Neil Hamilton Fairley Travelling Fellowship at the University of Southampton and University College London, under the supervision of Professors Stephen Holgate, Donna Davies and Sebastian Johnston. He was a member of the TSANZ executive board and chairman of the clinical care and resources subcommittee from 2011 to 2015. He was a board member of the National Asthma Council of Australia from 2011 to 2014. He is currently on the board of directors for Cystic Fibrosis Australia and the National Asthma Council.