Dr Lakshmana Ayaru

Dr Laksh Ayaru has been a Consultant Gastroenterologist and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (Charing Cross and Hammersmith Hospitals) and Imperial College London respectively since his appointment in 2010. He is an expert therapeutic endoscopist and a nationally accredited colonoscopist on the bowel cancer screening programme.

He qualified from Guys and St Thomas’s medical school with distinction in 1995 and trained in gastroenterology mainly at University College and the Royal Free Hospitals. He completed a prestigious training fellowship from 2008-2009  in advanced endoscopy with The Advanced Therapeutic Endoscopy Group, headed by Professor Marcon at St Michaels Hospital, Toronto which is a World Endoscopy Organisation (WEO) centre of excellence.

Dr Ayaru has major research interests in the development of novel diagnostic tests and therapies for pancreaticobiliary malignancy and gastrointestinal bleeding. His research training was with the NIH funded hepatopancreaticobiliary dysplasia and malignancy group headed by Dr S Pereira at The Institute of Hepatology, UCL and the CRUK Chromosomal Replication Group based at The Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, UCL led by Professor G Williams. He was awarded a PhD in Medicine from UCL in 2007 which was rated as outstanding. Notable achievements include development  of a novel diagnostic test for pancreaticobiliary cancer which detects the DNA replication licensing factor Mcm 5 in biliary cytology specimens. This exciting discovery has led to a major grant award from the MRC to validate this test in high-risk groups which is ongoing. To develop immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer Dr Ayaru has ongoing projects analysing and manipulating tumour specific T cells against this malignancy.