Patrick Vallance

St George's Hospital, Tooting, London

From 1986 to 1995 he taught at St George's Hospital Medical School,[1][5] where his research concentrated on vascular biology and endothelial cell physiology.[7][8] Prior to the discovery of nitric oxide, it was believed that high blood pressure was usually a result of constrictor activity in blood vessels. Vallance performed studies which demonstrated the link between nitric oxide and blood pressure.[9]

In 1987, with Joe Collier, he set out to investigate whether human blood vessels demonstrated endothelium-dependent relaxation, a term coined in 1980 by Robert F. Furchgott and John V. Zawadzki after discovering that a large blood vessel would not relax when its single-layered inner most lining was removed. Furchgott and Zawadzki subsequently showed that the occurrence was mediated by what they called endothelium-derived relaxing factor, later found to be nitric oxide, and it was shortly shown to occur in a variety of animals. Using veins from the back of a human hand, Vallance and Collier reproduced Furchgott and Zawadzki's findings.[2][10] Subsequently, their team showed that the human arterial vasculature is actively dilated by a continuous release of nitric oxide.[8][11] In 1991, Vallance and Salvador Moncada published a paper on the role of nitric oxide in cirrhosis, proposing an association between the changes in blood flow in cirrhosis and the vasoactive properties of nitric oxide.[12] The following year they reported that the plasma concentrations of asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) were elevated in people who were uraemic.[13][14]

From 1995 to 2002 he was professor at UCL Medical School, and professor of medicine from 2002 to 2006, and head of medicine.[1][15] He was also registrar of the Academy of Medical Sciences.[8] In 2005, as head of the division of medicine at UCL, he published a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, titled "A post-take ward round", in which he suggested that "reinvention of teams of doctors, nurses, therapists and social workers seems like an important task for general medicine".[16][17][18]

In 2006, in his mid-40s, he joined GSK as head of drug discovery.[19][20] Four years later he became head of medicines discovery and development and in 2012 he was appointed head of research and development at GSK.[21][22][23][24][25] Under his leadership at GSK, new medicines for cancer, asthma, autoimmune diseases and HIV infection were discovered and approved for use worldwide. He championed open innovation and novel industry-academic partnerships globally,[8][26][24] and maintained a strong focus on the search for new antibiotics and treatments for tropical diseases.[8][27]

Patrick Vallance. British Government photograph.

In March 2018, Vallance left GSK and was appointed Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, replacing Mark Walport.[28] In this role he leads the Government Office for Science, advising the prime minister and the cabinet.[29][30] In 2018, he was one of nine scientific advisers who, in a paper in Nature, called for "inclusive, rigorous, transparent, and accessible information for policy makers" and supported the Evidence-Based Research Network, established in 2016, to "lobby for all proposals for new research to be supported by references to systematic reviews of relevant existing research".[31]

In March 2020, as the government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Vallance appeared alongside prime minister Boris Johnson and the Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Whitty, in press briefings on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom.[32][33]

His publications[7] include:

• Hyperdynamic circulation in cirrhosis: a role for nitric oxide?[34]
• Physiological importance of nitric oxide[35]
• Exploring vascular nitric oxide in health and disease[2]
• Nitric oxide in the human cardiovascular system[36]
• Sildenafil: desired and undesired effects[37]

• Four principles to make evidence synthesis more useful for policy[38]

In 1995, Vallance was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP).[1] The following year he delivered the Goulstonian Lecture of the Royal College of Physicians, where he gave details of the connection between nitric oxide and blood pressure.[39] In 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), and in 2002 he was awarded the Graham Bull Prize for Clinical Science.[8] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017.[8] In the 2019 New Year Honours he was appointed Knight Bachelor.[40]