Geoffrey L. Chupp, MD

Geoffrey Chupp, MD, is a pulmonologist who specializes in lung diseases that affect the airway, including severe asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), bronchiolitis, autoimmune airway diseases, and airway diseases that have not been classified. He also specializes in eosinophilic lung diseases such as eosinophilic pneumonia, eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGPA), and Allergic Bronchopulmonary Aspergillosis (ABPA).

He often helps patients who have complex disease that has been difficult to treat.

“I wanted to pursue a career in medicine to comfort people who are sick and discover the cause or causes of their disease,” says Dr. Chupp. Working with pulmonary patients is especially rewarding for a doctor, he adds. “It crosses all segments of society, so I get to meet lots of interesting people.”

Dr. Chupp came to Yale in 1997 and developed the Yale Center for Asthma & Airways Disease (YCAAD), a multidisciplinary clinical program that he still directs. The center cares for a broad spectrum of conditions and has helped patients with conditions that are difficult to diagnose, sometimes because of a co-occurring illness such as gastroesophageal reflux or sinusitis, and provides treatments that may not be available elsewhere. “We have novel biologic treatments and access to clinical trials for these patients,” he says.

Up to 20 clinical trials are active at any given time at YCAAD. This research has helped put Yale Medicine on the cutting edge of individualized asthma therapy and precision medicine for patients with asthma. “We see a future where we will be identifying a patient’s particular genetic risk factors and the molecular signals that are driving their particular disease,” says Dr. Chupp. “We will develop a combination of treatments that is personalized for every patient; it will include lifestyle recommendations, inhaled therapies, and biologic therapies that will maximally manage their disease without guesswork.”