Dr James Peters

I am a clinician-scientist and Honorary Consultant Rheumatologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge and at Barts Health NHS Trust in London, with a specialist clinical practice in vasculitis.

I am interested in the interface of inflammation and cardiovascular diseases and in using genomic technologies to better understand the pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases in humans. Unusually for a clinician, I have a strong quantitative and computational background (MPhil in Computational Biology and PhD in genomics from the University of Cambridge).

The importance of inflammation in cardiovascular diseases is now well established. Accelerated atherosclerosis is a feature of many of the autoimmune rheumatic diseases, and a better understanding of vascular inflammation is key to developing new therapies for atherosclerosis and for vasculitis.

Against this background, my research focuses on gaining insight into the aetiology of cardiovascular diseases and vascular inflammation by applying –omic (particularly proteomic) technologies at the population level. An important approach is the use of Mendelian randomisation to identify likely causal mediators of cardiovascular diseases which may be amenable to therapeutic intervention.