Dr Rory Chan
Clinical Senior Lecturer Hon Consultant
Respiratory Medicine and Gastroenterology, Faculty of Health
Contact
Biography
Dr Rory Chan, MBChB, PhD, FRCPE, is a clinical senior lecturer in respiratory medicine at the University of Dundee and an honorary consultant respiratory physician at NHS Tayside. He divides his time equally between clinical practice and research, providing specialist asthma care alongside inpatient respiratory and acute medical care at Ninewells Hospital.
His research focuses on precision medicine in asthma, particularly severe asthma, small airways dysfunction, and the use of physiological and inflammatory measurements to guide personalised treatment. He leads the Scottish Airways Research Network (SARN), which brings together clinicians and researchers across 11 NHS Scottish health boards to advance the understanding and management of airways disease. This collaborative programme is supported by unrestricted research funding from Chiesi, AstraZeneca and GSK.
Rory also chairs the Oscillometry Asthma Registry (OAR), an international collaboration spanning Scotland, Italy and Belgium that aims to advance the use of oscillometry in assessing small airways dysfunction. He has secured an Asthma + Lung UK fellowship to investigate sputum neutrophil proteases in type 2-low asthma and is undertaking an MSc in Epidemiology by distance learning at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Rory contributes to national and international respiratory guidelines and professional societies. He is Scottish Co-Chair of the forthcoming BTS/SIGN severe asthma guideline and a core member of the group developing the BTS clinical statement on biologics in COPD. He serves as Secretary of the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) task force on upper and lower airway sampling methods, which is developing a position paper. He is also the elected Early Career Representative for European Respiratory Society (ERS) Assembly 5, covering asthma, COPD and chronic cough, and serves on the asthma editorial board of CHEST.
Alongside these roles, Rory is the Year 1 respiratory medicine teaching block convenor and supervises clinical and postgraduate researchers.
Research
Key research
- An international Oscillometry Asthma Registry (OAR) study examining the interrelationships between obesity, small airways dysfunction and exacerbations (Portacci A et al. Eur Respir J. 2026 May 21:2600150.).
- A prospective phase IV clinical trial demonstrating that benralizumab, an anti-IL-5Rα therapy, attenuates mannitol airway hyperresponsiveness in severe eosinophilic asthma. (Chan R et al. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2023 Mar;151(3):700-705.e10.)
- An analysis from ATLANTIS linking small airways dysfunction to a lower likelihood of asthma remission. (Chan R and Kumar A et al Allergy. 2026 Sep;81(9):3185-3196.). Complementary work demonstrated an association between improved peripheral airway reactance and clinical remission, highlighting the potential relevance of small airway physiology to treatment outcomes. (Lim JV et al. Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol. 2026 Aug 3:S1081-1206(26)00364-9.).
- An invited editorial discussing win ratio analyses of the BOREAS and NOTUS dupilumab trials and their implications for interpreting treatment benefits in COPD. (Chan R et al. Chest. 2026 Jul;170(1):8-10.)