Dr Richard Stratton

Professional details and experience, special areas of interest, notable achievements, reasons for a patient to choose you. Please also aim to include a few words about your personal interests. Aim to make your profile professional yet approachable. Think of your profile as your personal ad! Dr Richard Stratton is a Consultant Physician and Rheumatologist and Associate Professor at the Centre for Rheumatology, within the Division of Medicine at UCL. He is Clinical Lead for Rheumatology at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and specialises in connective tissue disorders, systemic rheumatic diseases and research into mechanisms of fibrosis. After studying medicine at Oxford University, Richard trained in rheumatology at Guy’s Hospital before moving to the Royal Free in 1995. As a clinical research fellow, he worked under the supervision of Professor Dame Carol Black and Professor Jeremy Pearson and obtained his MD from King’s College in 1999. He became a visiting research fellow at FibroGen (California, US) under Professor George Martin (NIH), studying the regulation of pro-fibrotic growth factors in scleroderma. Subsequently, he completed a PhD thesis at UCL and was later appointed as a Consultant at the Royal Free. He has continued his research programme into studying the mechanisms underlying fibrosis in scleroderma, focusing on the role of epithelial cells which have a key role in promoting the skin fibrosis in the disease. His special interests are in developing novel strategies to treat fibrosis using scleroderma as a model. Current approaches include evaluating anti-inflammatory peptides, as well as the targeting of enzymes involved in collagen alignment. Dr Stratton has shown that therapeutic peptides which target the disease macrophages via CD206 receptor effectively inhibit their activation state and eliminate pro-fibrotic cross talk. The lead candidate peptide that he has identified is being taken forward into a clinical trial. Dr Stratton has published many scientific papers and often lectures at international scientific conferences. Dr Stratton enjoys supervising BSc research students, PDRAs, PhD and clinical research fellows in a research group based at UCL Centre for Rheumatology, Royal Free Hospital campus. In his free time, Richard is a car enthusiast, and enjoys travelling in Europe.

I have a specialist interest in connective tissue disorders, systemic inflammatory conditions and in the use of biologic therapies and disease modifying treatments.