Nicholas Paton is a professor of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research interests are optimisation of HIV and tuberculosis treatment in resource-limited settings.
In the field of HIV, he has led pivotal clinical trials such as EARNEST and NADIA, testing options for second line therapy in Africa that have changed WHO and other major international treatment guidelines for management of drug-resistant HIV infection; and changed the approach to and interpretation of drug resistance testing in public health treatment programmes. He is the scientific lead of the CARES trial, testing 2-monthly injectable long-acting therapy for HIV that has changed WHO treatment guidelines for management of first-line treatment.
In the field of TB, he leads a programme of treatment trials coordinated from Singapore, including the TRUNCATE-TB trial, conducted in a network of 18 sites in Asia and Africa that evaluated a strategy for using 8 weeks of initial treatment instead of the standard 24-week regimen for TB; and various trials of host-directed therapy for TB. He is a core academic lead for the EU-funded UNITE4TB trials consortium and the Chief Investigator for the flagship trial of that network – the PARADIGM4TB trial – which is testing multiple new drug combinations for tuberculosis in a global network of clinical research sites