Ganesh Raghu Back

Professor Raghu received his medical degree from the University of Mysore, India, before postdoctoral training in internal and chest medicine in the UK (University of New Castle), residency in Internal medicine in USA (State University of New York at Buffalo, NY,USA) and fellowships in pulmonary diseases, critical care medicine and lung cell biology in USA( University of Washington, Seattle).

Dr Raghu has had a longstanding clinical and scientific interest focused on pathogenesis, diagnosis and management of ILD, idiopathic interstitial pneumonia (IIP), Sarcoid, Rheumatological lung diseases, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in particular. He is an international authority in these disorders.

At the University of Washington Medical Center, he currently is the director of the Center for ILD. He also served as the Director and Medical Director of the UW Lung transplant program that he initiated, developed and founded in 1991. Following the initiation and development of the UW’s CENTER for ILD in 2013, he stepped down his administrative and leadership roles of the UW lung transplant program but continues to be the transplant pulmonologist for patients with ILD and remains an active member of the UW Lung transplant program and committee.

He serves on several national and international committees for management of ILD and IPF as well as in the National Institutes of Health (NIH, USA) lung biology and pathology study section on an ad-hoc basis. He serves as the chair of an international committee of IPF experts in developing and maintaining evidence-based guidelines for diagnosis and management of IPF[sponsored by ATS-ERS-JRS-ALAT (American Thoracic Society, European Respiratory Society, Japanese Resp Society and Assoc.of Latin Am. Thoracic Society), and served as the Co-Chair of international committees of experts in developing two other ATS clinical practice guidelines -1) on the clinical utility of Bronchoalveolar lavage in the management of ILD(sponsored by the ATS) and 2) Bronchiolitis Obliterans syndrome following lung transplantation (jointly sponsored by the ATS/ERS/ISHLT(International Society of Heart and Lung Transplant) and). He and the co-chairs of the International Lung transplant committee have also provided a consensus statement on Chronic Lung allograft Dysfunction (CLAD). He also served as an International committee member that originally wrote an ATS document on the classification of Idiopathic interstitial pneumonia (IIP) and revised the classification of IIP (sponsored by the ATS and ERS). He is also an ad-hoc advisory panel member for the division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Rheumatology of the FDA (USA). He serves on the scientific advisory board for the Pulmonary fibrosis foundation, USA.

Dr Raghu’s 30+ years of research is devoted to both basic science (lung fibroblast and extracellular matrix) and translational and clinical studies in the field of pulmonary fibrosis, idiopathic interstitial pneumonia and sarcoid. Having conducted several prospective clinical studies and trials in IPF, and recently in pulmonary fibrosis associated with Scleroderma and sarcoidosis, he, along with other leading authorities, has provoked much awareness and interest for new treatment strategies based on the pathogenesis of pulmonary fibrosis. Among several research grants awarded to him and to his university from the NIH and the pharmaceutical industries to conduct IPF studies, he served in leadership roles in Clinical research network sponsored by the NIH – the IPF net in the USA.

Dr Raghu has authored over 325 publications in peer-reviewed medical journals, served on editorial boards of the Thorax, Current Opinion in Pulmonary Medicine, currently serves on the editorial board of the European Respiratory Journal, European Respiratory Review, as an advisory board member for The Lancet-Respiratory Medicine and is a frequent reviewer of manuscripts of original investigations submitted to many peer-reviewed prestigious journals with high impact factors such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Thorax, American Journal of Respiratory and critical care medicine and Chest.

Above all, he is a longstanding patient advocate and actively sees and manages patients with ILD every week at the Center for ILD at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. He founded a pulmonary fibrosis support and education group in the Pacific Northwest, USA in 1988, the first and the longest active group that meets every month at the University of Washington Medical Center and Dr Raghu attends this group meeting. 

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