We’re excited to once again highlight our incredible Early Career Investigators (ECIs). Today we’re speaking with Dr. Emma Magavern, a physician specializing in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics and General Internal Medicine. Recently, she’s been appointed as a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Academic Clinical Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. “My research is in pharmacogenomics, how genetics impacts medication safety and efficacy,” she notes.
Like many of our ECIs, Dr. Magavern’s drive toward medicine was fueled by a desire to help others, “I felt it was a profession that makes a meaningful contribution to people’s lives and was attracted by the lifelong learning aspect and the blend of science and interaction with each unique patient.”
Within G2MC, Dr. Magavern is active in our Family Health History (FHH) Flagship Project, which aims to advance global recognition and implementation of family health history data collection tools and risk assessment methods among practitioners and patients. It’s an aim she feels very strongly about, “The benefits of detailed family health history are well understood in rare disease, and routinely integrated in common disease clinical assessments.” An example she mentions pertaining to this integration is coronary artery disease, “The origins of elucidation of genetic contribution to severe adverse drug reactions is also in family health history and pedigree analysis, such as in the case of malignant hyperthermia,” she explains, “yet there has been little written and a paucity of discussion around the integration of medication response phenotype with family health history.”
Concluding, Dr. Magavern summarizes that her goal in working with the G2MC Family Health History group is “to better bridge this gap in the literature and highlight the need for further research in this area with a subgroup dedicated to the integration of pharmacogenomics with family health history.”
Dr. Magavern remains excited about collaborating with both national and international partners to promote the use of pharmacogenomics in clinical settings where evidence to support its effectiveness remains solid, “My work focuses specifically on how genomic tools to predict response to medications can be leveraged to target existing health equality.” To accomplish this, she notes effective communication with healthcare professionals and the public is absolutely crucial.
When she’s not working, you can find Dr. Magavern instead spending quality time with her loved ones, diving into a good book, breaking a sweat in the great outdoors, or immersing herself in the vibrant arts scene of London.
The Consortium thanks Dr. Emma Magavern for her dedicated work within G2MC and outside the organization, and for taking the time to sit down and speak with us.
