Biography

Professor Guruprasad P. Aithal is the Professor of Hepatology and the Head of the Division for the Nottingham Digestive Diseases Centre and Deputy Director of Nottingham Molecular Pathology Node.

Professor Aithal is the GI & Liver Disorder Theme Lead at the NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre, and was the Director of NIHR Nottingham Digestive Diseases BRU between 2008 & 2016.

He won the NHS Innovation Award (2013), Shire Award for Gastrointestinal Excellence (2015) and was BMJ Gastroenterology team finalist (2015).

Professor Aithal’s research interests include drug-induced liver injury, metabolic liver disease, hepatopancreaticobiliary imaging and epidemiology of liver and biliary disorders.My study on pharmacogenetics of warfarin (Lancet 1999) stimulated the evaluation and application of pharmacogenetics in reducing drug related adverse events; FDA updated the warfarin labelling in 2007 and again in 2010 with a dosing table including CYP2C9 and VKORC1 genotype information. Leading national (DILIGEN) and international (iDILIC) consortia, our discoveries have established the role of adaptive immunity in the pathogenesis of human drug-induced liver injury (DILI) (Nat Genet 2009, Gastroenterology 2017 and 2019) and role of genetic tests in its diagnosis. FDA issued ‘Clinical Pharmacogenomics: Premarket Evaluation in Early-Phase Clinical Studies and Recommendations for Labelling’ in 2013’ (https://www.fda.gov/drugs/guidance-compliance-regulatory-information/guidances-drugs).

I am the Deputy Co-ordinator & DILI work package lead for the Innovation Medicines Initiative funded TrasnsBioLine programme (2019-24) and the Vice-Chair of the European Cooperation in Science & Technology (COST Action CA17112), ‘Prospective European Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network’ (2018-22).

I contributed critically to the evaluation of the Enhanced Liver Fibrosis panel (Hepatology. 2008 and 2013), the first non-invasive marker recommended for clinical use by National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), UK in 2016. I evaluated piogltazone (Gastroenterology. 2008) which has been recommended by NICE and European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) for the treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis in 2016. I was the co-investigator in the phase II trial of liraglutide (Lancet 2016) demonstrating its efficacy in the treatment of NASH.

I have led the development of fast, and inexpensive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method to estimate the degree of inflammation and fibrosis within the whole liver (NMR Biomed. 2015). Recently, he used this method to estimate portal pressure (J Hepatol 2016), showing that it correlates with hepatic venous pressure gradient measurements – the current gold standard but invasive and expensive test, only available in selected centres.

I have in total 197 publications including 104 original articles, 55 invited reviews/ editorials/ textbook chapters, 34 letters/ case reports and 4 collaborations. My H index is 53 currently.