About
Lauren Walker is Professor of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics and Honorary Consultant in General Internal Medicine. She co-leads the DynAIRx programme, funded by the NIHR AI in multimorbidity stream and her research interest involves utilising existing health record data to understand how multiple long-term conditions, and their associated prescriptions, evolve over time and how these relationships between drugs and diseases lead to harm. She is interested in predicting risk and examining patient journeys to identify at what point the harm of a medicine outweighs the potential for benefit. Lauren has co-developed a machine learning approach to identify disease and prescribing trajectories in people with complex care needs, utilizing existing health records (www.SERENDIP.org.uk).
She is also the Deputy Director of the NIHR Clinical Research Facility at Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and co-director of the Centre for Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Liverpool. She is one of the senior investigators for the Agile trial (https://www.agiletrial.net/), the only UK Government-funded early-phase trial platform for Covid-19 therapeutics and chief investigator for repurposing high-dose nitazoxanide for Covid-19, a Unitaid-funded programme to ensure low-cost solutions worldwide.
She contributes to outpatient clinics, inpatient reviews and multidisciplinary team meetings for adults with complex multimorbidity & polypharmacy. She co-chairs a National Polypharmacy Services Consortium (PPSC), a collaborative venture between Clinical Pharmacologists, Pharmacists, Geriatricians and GPs. PPSC works with members to design and develop an integrated service model and a unified, sustainable approach to improving polypharmacy, through multidisciplinary collaboration across primary and secondary care. Previously providing in-reach deprescribing services into primary care she now undertakes medicines optimisation through multispecialty, multimorbidity virtual multidisciplinary team, funded by Liverpool CCG that has improved outcomes through reduction in all-cause admissions, a service that was shortlisted for the HSJ Patient Safety and BMJ 2021 awards.
Prizes or Honours
- Research Delivery Team of The Year: AGILE Early Phase Trial Platform (2022 North West Coast Research and Innovation Awards, 2022)
- The Apothecaries’ Prize (The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, 2018)