Professor Julian F.R. Paton
BSc(Hon) PhD FRSNZ
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Educated at University of Birmingham (BSc) and London (PhD 1987), his post-doctoral training was at DuPont de Nemours (USA), University of Washington, (USA) and University of Gottingen (FRG) as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. He received a British Heart Foundation Fellowship and set up his independent research at the University of Bristol (1994). He transferred to the University of Auckland in 2017. He is Director of Manaaki Manawa (2019) – the Centre of Heart Research, University of Auckland and Co-Director of Pūtahi Manawa – Healthy Hearts of Aotearoa New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence (2021). In 2021, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He is a translational physiologist with research interests to understand autonomic neural coupling of the cardiovascular-respiratory systems in health and disease resulting in putative new ways to treat hypertension, sleep apnoea and diabetes. He is founder member of Ceryx Medical and developing a novel analogue bionic pacemaker for heart failure. He’s published over 400 peer reviewed papers and has an h-index of 80.
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Carotid Body: A Conductor of the Cardiorespiratory Orchestra
Cardiovascular, metabolic and respiratory illness remains the biggest non-communicable disease worldwide. Current therapies tend to treat symptoms and remain sub-optimal. Typically, cardiovascular diseases (e.g. hypertension, heart failure) are associated with respiratory disease such as sleep apnoea and diabetes but rarely is there a single therapy that treats the primary disease and co-morbidities. Our goal is to assess whether by correcting autonomic imbalance, which is rarely controlled with frontline medications, will both reduce sleep apnoea incidence and improve cardiovascular disease. The hypothesis tested was that sleep apnoea, cardiovascular and metabolic disease are mediated by a common mechanism.
The carotid body will be introduced as a novel target for controlling sympathetic activity and respiratory instability in cardiovascular-metabolic disease. Proof of concept studies will be described in animal models and humans. I will describe the molecular mechanisms causing carotid body dysfunction that have led to novel druggable receptors (purinergic, P2X3; glucagon like 1 peptide). I will how we have restored autonomic imbalance, reduced arterial pressure (in diabetic hypertension), and improved cardiac function and rescued respiratory instability in heart failure. The presentation will show how discovery science in animal models is being translated to first-in-human studies and offers new ways to treat diseases.
The carotid body will be introduced as a novel target for controlling sympathetic activity and respiratory instability in cardiovascular-metabolic disease. Proof of concept studies will be described in animal models and humans. I will describe the molecular mechanisms causing carotid body dysfunction that have led to novel druggable receptors (purinergic, P2X3; glucagon like 1 peptide). I will how we have restored autonomic imbalance, reduced arterial pressure (in diabetic hypertension), and improved cardiac function and rescued respiratory instability in heart failure. The presentation will show how discovery science in animal models is being translated to first-in-human studies and offers new ways to treat diseases.
