University of Manchester

David Denning, M.D.

Dr. Denning is a clinician with expertise in fungal diseases, working in an academic respiratory medicine department in a University hospital. He manages the National Aspergillosis Centre, Manchester which is the referral centre in the UK for all patients with chronic pulmonary aspergillosis (a population of 61 million). His group undertakes basic research (genomics, pathogenesis and mechanism of antifungal drug resistance), applied laboratory work (antifungal resistance testing and validation in models, pharmacodynamics, models of pathogenesis, molecular diagnostics), and clinical studies (description of the natural history of fungal infection, and therapy studies). He led the A. fumigatus genome sequencing project (since 1999), the coordinated analysis of the A. fumigatus, A. nidulans and A. oryzae genomes (since 2003), which lead to a triplet of papers in Nature in 2005. Earlier in his career, Dr. Denning developed a blood assay for aflatoxin , documented transplacental transfer of aflatoxin; developed a discriminatory molecular typing scheme for A. fumigatus, assessed the measurement of D-mannitol in CSF in patients with cryptococcal meningitis; noted multiple phospholipase activity in A. fumigatus; developed a knockout strategy for identifying essential genes in A. fumigatus (with J. Brookman); described azole resistance in Aspergilli; and documented a correlation between virulence and growth rate in wild type A. fumigatus isolates. He was integral to the successful completion of the randomized study comparing voriconazole with amphotericin B, published in 2002, and lead the randomized double-blind placebo controlled study of itraconazole for severe asthma with fungal sensitization, published in 2009. He has published more than 350 papers, books and book chapters, including an undergraduate textbook of Medicine.