The LSTM and Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospital’s Respiratory Research Team received The Chief Executive’s Award at the recent Make a Difference Awards 2015 at BT Convention Centre this weekend.
The annual awards ceremony celebrates the contribution that employees, as both individuals and teams, have made to the service and is run by the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust. The night is an opportunity for staff, partners and sponsors to get together and learn about the work of others and to celebrating excellence in clinical practice.
The Respiratory Research Team won The Chief Executive’s Award, part of the Director’s Star Awards, which was voted by the Trust Board and recognises a team or individual who has collaborated with a source outside the Trust for the greater good of the Trust. Senior Lecturer at LSTM, Dr Daniela Ferreira said: “The judges were impressed with the innovation and passion we employ as a partnership and the global impact that our work will have on patients across the world as well as offering clear benefits to the well-being of local patients.”
The world-class team, which has been run by LSTM’s Professor Stephen Gordon who has this week taken up his new post as the Director of the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme in Malawi. The group that is now led by Dr Ferreira at LSTM has developed a unique Experimental Human Pneumococcal Carriage model, which has been designed to investigate human immune response to pneumococcal colonisation of the nasal passage. The model has been used to test the efficacy of novel vaccines utilising fewer subjects and over a much reduced study period and has already attracted millions of pounds in research grants to further development the model to now study susceptible groups (asthmatics, elderly, smokers) and interaction of pneumococcus with influenza vaccine.