Professor John Gosney (centre) with Professor John Field (left), Professor of Molecular Oncology, University of Liverpool, and Dr Sanjay Popat (right), Consultant Medical Oncologist, Royal Marsden Hospital and Imperial College London and President of the British Thoracic Oncology Group
Professor John Gosney from the University’s Institute of Translational Medicine has been given a prestigious life time achievement award by the British Thoracic Oncology Group (BTOG).
The award, which was presented at the 15th annual meeting in Dublin, is given to those who have made a significant contribution to the management of thoracic malignancies in the UK and Ireland.
John is Consultant Thoracic Pathologist at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and Professor of Thoracic Pathology at the University of Liverpool. He also holds a Visiting Professorship in Thoracic Pathology at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
Lung cancer diagnostics
He is responsible for the service in diagnostic thoracic pathology provided by Liverpool Clinical Laboratories (LCL) for the city of Liverpool via the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, University Hospital Aintree and the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, and for the service in the predictive profiling of lung cancer provided for the greater Merseyside area.
Since 2000, Professor Gosney has specialised entirely in Thoracic Pathology and has gradually developed the service in lung cancer diagnostics that LCL provides to Merseyside and beyond. This area of pathology has expanded enormously over the past decade with the advent of ‘personalised medicine’ and of therapies precisely targeted at different types of lung cancer according to their genomic and proteomic profile.
Highly regarded
John has spent his entire career in Liverpool, graduating from Liverpool Medical School in 1980, where he also obtained a first class BSc honours degree in Physiology, and was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in Pathology.
As well as his diagnostic and developmental work, John is also active academically. He has published 140 papers in peer-reviewed journals and talks frequently at international meetings and conferences. He is co-author of the Royal College of Pathologists’ datasets and guidelines for the handling and reporting of pulmonary specimens, President of the Association of Pulmonary Pathologists and contributor to the World Health Organization’s classification of tumours of the lungs and pleura.
Of his award Professor Gosney, said: “What is particularly gratifying is that it is awarded not by pathologists, but largely by oncologists and respiratory physicians, reflecting the quality of the diagnostic service we provide, its importance in managing patients and how very highly it is regarded by our clinical colleagues.”
