Peter Taylor

Peter C. Taylor was appointed to the Norman Collisson chair of musculoskeletal sciences at the University of Oxford in October 2011 and is a Fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford. He is the Head of Clinical Sciences at the Botnar Research Centre where he directs the Biomedical Research Unit Inflammation theme and leads the rheumatology clinical trials group and related translational research programme at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology within the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences. He was formerly Professor of Experimental Rheumatology at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology Division, Imperial College, London, and honorary consultant rheumatologist working in Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust. He was also Dean of the Charing Cross campus. He studied pre-clinical medical sciences at Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge and his first degree was in Physiology. He subsequently studied clinical medicine at the University of Oxford and was awarded a PhD degree from the University of London for studies on pathogenesis of arthritis.

Professor Taylor has specialist clinical interests in rheumatoid arthritis and early inflammatory arthritis. He has over 20 years' experience in clinical trial design and international leadership in studies of biologic and small molecular therapies in RA and AS. His research interests are in the use of novel imaging for evaluation of prognosis, the assessment of responses to therapy and as an early indicator of inflammation suppression as well as disease modification particularly as applied to early phase clinical trial design. He has recently pioneered studies using such measures as primary outcome measures in early phase Ib/IIa studies with a view to informing later phase study design. He has been a principal investigator in numerous international clinical trials of biologic therapies including the earliest seminal trails of anti-TNF and anti-IL-6 receptor therapy and is currently chief investigator in a number of small molecule therapies in clinical trials for rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis.