Post-retirement
After his retirement in 1985, he continued working first at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith and then at St George's, University of London. With Dr Amina Jindani and colleagues in South Africa, he developed the technique of measuring the early bactericidal activity of drugs, which is now standard practice as the initial step in the phase II of clinical development of new drugs. He also introduced the concept of the 8-week phase II study with the proportion of patients obtaining negative sputum culture at 8 weeks, a standard assessment in most such studies. More recently he developed (with Dr Geraint Davies and the South African MRC) a new type of phase II 8-week study using modelling of counts of TB in sputum during treatment. He has done work on several new anti-TB drugs and participated in clinical trials on high dosage rifamycins.
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