The Endocrine Society is pleased to welcome its president for 2024 – 2025, John Newell-Price, MD, PhD, FRCP, who took office during ENDO 2024 in Boston.
Newell-Price is Professor of Endocrinology at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He is also head of the Endocrinology Service at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and of the ENETS European Centre of Excellence for Neuroendocrine Tumors at the hospital.
Newell-Price’s clinical expertise includes pituitary and adrenal disorders, genetic endocrine disease, and neuroendocrine tumors and cancer. His research group focuses on glucocorticoid excess and deficiency, with discoveries that have resulted in new paradigms of diagnosis and treatment.
Newell-Price succeeds Stephen Hammes, MD, PhD, who handed over the gavel in Boston during a formal ceremony. “I feel truly honored and humbled to be elected, especially as I will be the first non-U.S. president, itself a testament to the outward looking and global nature of the Society,” Newell-Price says. “Inevitably my emotions on hearing the results of the election last year included some feelings of trepidation and a healthy dose of imposter syndrome!”
Newell-Price goes on to credit Hammes and Hammes’s predecessor Ursula Kaiser, MD, as well as the Society’s board of directors, executive team, and staff for their support in turning those initial feelings into those of excitement and confidence to be taking up the role.
A Patient-Centered Career
Newell-Price attended the University of Cambridge, where in addition to medicine he also studied for his undergraduate degree in “Social and Political Science,” saying that what he learned in that discipline has greatly benefitted him, both inside and outside of medicine. He went on to qualify in medicine at the University of Cambridge in 1990, undertook his clinical endocrine specialist training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and was awarded his PhD from the University of London.
“After qualifying, I worked in London for 10 years,” he says. “During my initial years of internal medicine training I presented as a guest at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (‘Barts’) Grand Round and had what I can only describe as a thorough grilling from Mike Besser, the discussion was phenomenal and this experience led me to target a job to work at Bart’s in endocrinology.”
From there, Newell-Price worked for and trained with luminaries of clinical endocrinology — Mike Besser, John Wass, Ashley Grossman, and John Monson — with three of those years as a Medical Research Council Training Fellow for his PhD in Adrian Clark’s molecular biology lab where he worked on the epigenetic regulation of POMC expression. “I learnt so much, and to this day I remain indebted to the exceptional training across the entire breadth of endocrinology,” he says. “All the while the patient was at the center of everything we did, maintaining a strong emphasis on research and teaching — an approach to which I will always adhere.”
In 2000, Tony Weetman and Richard Ross recruited Newell-Price to Sheffield, where, along with his colleagues, he aimed to build the endocrine service in Sheffield into the exceptional center it is today. “We are one of the busiest centers in the U.K. for pituitary, and adrenal disorders and neuroendocrine tumors, and since 2015 have been an ENETS (European Neuroendocrine Tumor Society) European Centre of Excellence for Neuroendocrine Tumors,” Newell-Price says.
“Over the last two decades, I have also worked at national and international levels in roles where I felt that I could make a difference,” he continues. “Primarily, this has been directly related to the science, practice, and training of endocrinology, with the Endocrine Society and other societies, but also in health policy, service design, and service delivery at a national level with NHS England and the Society for Endocrinology in the U.K. A very important aspect for me has been close working with, and for, Patient Support Charities, where I have held Trustee and advisor roles over many years.”
An Early Fascination with Endocrinology
Newell-Price tells Endocrine News that endocrinology fascinated him as a medical student, that the interplay between hormones and their effect on human physiology all just made sense. His current interests in endocrinology were sparked years ago: the long case in his medical finals was a patient who had Cushing’s disease and Nelson’s syndrome, and a few years later, the long case in his membership exam for the Royal College of Physicians was a patient with a metastatic insulinoma. His first published case report during internal medicine training, before specializing in endocrinology, was of a patient with ectopic gastrin secretion from an ovarian carcinoma causing Zollinger Ellison syndrome.
“When training at Barts there was, and still is, a major interest in pituitary and adrenal disorders, genetic endocrine disease and neuroendocrine tumors,” Newell-Price says. “In Sheffield I have a very busy clinical practice in all these areas, with increasing amounts of ‘onco-endocrinology’. Over the past two decades there has been an explosion in our understanding of these conditions that has translated into better diagnostics and therapies. The landscape has really improved for patients over this short timescale, and that is truly exciting.”
ENDO 1995: Breathtaking and Nerve-wracking
Newell-Price remembers his first ENDO in 1995 in Washington, D.C., as “nerve-wracking,” as he was presenting an oral communication of a study on the use of desmopressin in the diagnosis of ACTH-dependent Cushing’s syndrome. “I was just a junior fellow and representing Barts, but I had lots of support and interest from senior members of the Endocrine Society whose famous ‘names’ I had only read about, but reassuringly they were all so ‘human’!” he says. “I was amazed by the sheer range and scale of the meeting. There were thousands of people with clinical and science presentations and Meet the Professor sessions being incredible and inspiring. The huge poster hall was quite breathtaking and there was a buzz of discussions — I had never experienced anything like it.”
That experience galvanized his interest in the Endocrine Society and he was asked to join the writing group for the Society’s first Clinical Practice Guidelines for diagnosis of Cushing’s syndrome that came out in 2008 and then that for treatment of Cushing’s syndrome in 2015, as well as the Annual Meeting Steering Committee for three years where he became lead for both pituitary and adrenal themes. “Lynnette Nieman then asked me to be the overall chair of the ENDO meeting in Chicago in 2018, which was an amazing and rewarding experience, albeit a lot of work!” he says. “I have had many other roles for the Endocrine Society, including on The Governance Task Force, Clinical Practice Guidelines Committee, and most recently being on the Board of Directors. It has been, and is, such a privilege to work with the many super smart friends, colleagues, and staff.”
No Shortage of Inspiration
Still, among all the committees and boards and his new role as Society president, Newell-Price says that he is humbled every day by the experiences and extraordinary resilience of the patients and families he sees, which inspires him to continually seek to improve care. “Their stories provide focus for research questions aimed at improving diagnosis and treatment,” he says. “More inspiration comes from working with phenomenal colleagues and together we pull in the same direction and by working in teams we solve problems, be these at a clinical or research level, or at a structural level, for example in healthcare delivery or medical and postgraduate education.”
And that inspiration is what Newell-Price says drives him toward achieving his goals for his presidential tenure: working closely with sister endocrine societies globally, championing those in the early stages of their careers while seeking to understand and the solve pipeline issues for endocrinology. “We need to continue to embrace and improve diversity in the Society, and ensure basic scientists truly see the Society as their ‘home’,” he says. “Having the patient voice heard is crucial and we need to embrace and integrate advanced care practitioners and nurse specialists who are so crucial for patient care.”
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