The Emergency and Critical Care Medicine team is led by Professor Anthony Gordon, a Clinical Senior Lecturer and Consultant in Critical Care Medicine based at Charing Cross Hospital. He is also a Director of Research for the Intensive Care Foundation.

As well as clinical trials, Professor Gordon leads a multidisciplinary group undertaking translational research studies in sepsis.

The aim is to develop biomarkers to help stratify patients into more homogeneous groups who are then more likely to benefit from specific treatments. Professor Gordon sits on the management committee of the UK Critical Care Genomics groups and leads a team at Imperial investigating metabolic profiling in critically ill patients.

The Emergency and Critical Care Medicine team have expertise in successfully recruiting critically ill patients into research trials in the emergency setting, often with very short recruitment windows.

Most patients in this situation will lack capacity to consent and the group has developed robust mechanisms to ensure full compliance with all the ethical and regulatory issues.

Professor Gordon is currently Chief investigator on two ICTU multi-centre trials examining alternatives to catecholamines in septic shock:

• Early vasopressin use in septic shock and its interaction with corticosteroids (VANISH trial)
• Levosimendan for the prevention of organ failure (LeoPARDS trial)