Ask the Experts: Ian Wilson

Ian Wilson 

Professor of Drug Metabolism and Molecular Toxicology, Imperial College London (London, UK).

Ian worked in the areas of bioanalysis, metabolic phenotyping and drug metabolism in the pharmaceutical industry for over 30 years, most recently as a Senior Principal Scientist in the Department of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics at the AstraZeneca Research site at Alderley Park in Cheshire (UK), before moving to Imperial College London in 2012 where he is Professor of Drug Metabolism and Molecular Toxicology. His research is directed towards the development and application of advanced analytical techniques to problems in drug metabolism, toxicology and metabonomics and is the author or co-author of over 520 publications in these areas.

What began your interest in metabolomics?

As a much younger man in the late 1980s, long before the use of the terms metabonomics and metabolomics were ever used, I listened to a lecture by, the then, Dr Jeremy Nicholson (then at Birkbeck College and now at Imperial College, London) (given at Hoechst Pharmaceuticals in Milton Keynes) on the use of ¹H NMR spectroscopy to analyze urine and plasma for metabolites (drug and endogenous). I went into the lecture deeply sceptical and came out hooked for life!