Professor Sir Stephen Holgate
Professor Sir Stephen Holgate, knighted in the 2020 Honours list for his services to medical research, is the Chair of the UK CFS/ME Research Collaborative, Medical Research Council Clinical Professor of Immunopharmacology and Honorary Consultant Physician within Medicine at the University of Southampton (England). His stated aim for the Collaborative is to find and develop a “dream team” of researchers to work on this highly complex illness which he believes could have twelve to fifteen different “causal pathways“.
Sir Stephen has devoted much of his 40-year career to focusing on the interface between basic sciences and clinical application in the fields of allergy and asthma. He is one of the world’s foremost spokespeople on air pollution, is Government Advisor and one of the co-founders of Synairgen. Which is a University of Southampton spin-out company that has developed inhaled Interferon Beta, effective against viral respiratory diseases, including Covid-19 – which he describes as “a multi-system disorder which is described by people who experience it as being “taken off their feet” and going from one day to the other not knowing whether they are going to be able to do anything that they normally do; and this may last days, weeks or months. There are now 16 different symptoms from Long Covid, including particular features that have with CFS/ME commonality which can occur after viral infections, so we’ve got a lot to learn about this”.