Dr Kenneth Baillie, a Consultant in ICU in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh has received the Special Recognition Award at this year’s Pride Of Scotland event.
The award comes as recognition for Dr Baillie leading on a number vital studies concerning COVID-19.
Dr Baillie said: “It’s lovely to receive this award but also very important to say it recognises the work of thousands of people across the UK – including my clinical colleagues, the doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and other staff in critical care in Lothian, who provided outstanding clinical care in unimaginable circumstances, and the research teams and patients up and down the country who contributed to the GenOMICC, ISARIC4C, RECOVERY and RECOVERY-RS studies.”
Dr Baillie has focused the majority of the last 20 years of his career focussing his research on better care for seriously ill patients and how genes can play a part in response to infection. This has been while working in Roslin Institute in University of Edinburgh.
His work on COVID-19 has lead to the discovery that there are in fact genetic associations with critical Covid-19 cases and that those with particular genes were more likely to get it badly.
He has also contributed to the launch of the RECOVERY trial, which found the first effective treatment which is a steroid called dexamethasone and has gone on to find a further two treatments.
