Professor Mark Wilcox, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

Professor Wilcox is a Consultant / Head of Microbiology Research & Development / and Infection Lead of the Leeds NIHR Diagnostic Technologies Medical Technology and In Vitro Diagnostic Co-operative at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust;

Professor of Medical Microbiology, Sir Edward Brotherton Chair of Bacteriology, at the University of Leeds;

Lead on C. difficile infection for Public Health England; & National Clinical Director, Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Prevention and Control for NHS England.

He has formerly been the Director of Infection Prevention (4 years), Infection Control Doctor (8 years), Clinical Director of Pathology (6 years) and Head of Microbiology (15 years) at LTHT.

Professor Wilcox is Chair of PHE’s Rapid Review Panel (reviews the utility of infection prevention & control products for the NHS), and is a member of the PHE’s Programme Board on Healthcare Associated Infection & Antimicrobial Resistance.  Since the pandemic, he is a member of UK Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE, COVID-19; and chairs one of its subgroups on Nosocomial Infection), and a co-chair of DHSC’s UK Technical Validation Group for COVID-19 tests.  He is a member of the Medical Research Council’s Infections and Immunity Board, and the Scientific Advisory Board for the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative’s COMBACTE-NET consortium.  From 2017, he was seconded one day per week to NHS Improvement to support the delivery of the new national target to reduce healthcare associated Gram-negative blood stream infections in England.  He was the Deputy Chair of the UK Department of Health’s Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection (ARHAI) Committee up until 2018.

He is an expert advisor to the Department of Health in England on healthcare associated infections (HCAIs), UK NICE (C. difficile management and antimicrobial evaluations project), the UK EPIC/NICE projects, the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) programme on Healthcare Associated Infection, the Wellcome Trust and CARB-X panel on novel antimicrobials, and the European Centre for Disease Control.  He is a member of UK, European and US working groups on C. difficile infection, and is on the Editorial Boards of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Journal of Hospital Infection and Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice.  He has provided clinical advice as part of the FDA/EMA submissions for the approval of several novel antimicrobial agents, 1998-2016.

Professor Wilcox heads a Healthcare Associated Infection research team at the University of Leeds (https://medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/faculty-/dir-record/research-groups/905/healthcare-associated-infection-research-group), comprising ~30 doctors, scientists and nurses; projects include multiple aspects of Clostridium difficile infection, diagnostics, antibiotic resistance and the gut microbiome, staphylococcal infection, and the clinical development of new antimicrobial agents.  He has a track record of translational research (https://medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/medicine/staff/3541/professor-mark-wilcox), including providing the basis of clinical advice to the NHS.  He has been the Principal/UK Investigator for 15 clinical trials of new anti-infective drugs, 1999-2018, has carried out multiple NIHR portfolio studies on healthcare associated infection topics, and is currently supplying central laboratory services for several clinical trials of antimicrobial agents.  He has authored >560 papers and published a number of books and chapters.  He is co-editor of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (5th/6th/7th Eds, 2007/12/15).