Faculty:
The opinions expressed in the educational activity are those of the faculty and do not necessarily represent the views of AASLD. Please refer to the official prescribing information for each product for discussion of approved indications, contraindications, and warnings
Christine M. Hunt, MD MPH:
Dr. Christine Hunt is a hepatologist and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Duke University. She first pursued basic and clinical hepatology research on the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University before being recruited to Duke University, where she examined the effects of aging on drug metabolism and pursued viral hepatitis research. Recruited to GSK, Dr. Hunt worked on successful new drug approvals for viral hepatitis and GI disease. As Chair of the GSK Hepatotoxicity Board, she led numerous analyses of ALT data and risk factors for drug toxicity and developed liver chemistry-based electronic health record algorithms to identify drug-induced liver injury with Kaiser colleagues. As a GSK Vice President, Dr. Hunt collaborated in global consortia on the prediction, phenotyping, genotyping, and biomarkers of drug-induced liver injury. Leaving GSK to pursue a Master in Public Heath at UNC, she now works on liver disease at Duke and the Veterans Health Administration and consults in hepatology.
John Toffaletti, PhD:
John Toffaletti received a BS from the University of Florida in Gainesville and followed this with training in clinical chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a PhD in Biochemistry, then completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Clinical Chemistry at Hartford Hospital.
Since completing these programs, he has worked in the Clinical Laboratories at Duke University Medical Center since 1979, where he is now Professor of Pathology, Director of the Blood Gas Laboratory, the Clinical Pediatric Laboratory, and several Outpatient Laboratories. He is also the Chief of Clinical Chemistry at the Durham VA Medical Center. His research interests include sample collection, pre-analytical errors, analysis, and clinical use of these tests.
Lily Dara, MD:
Lily Dara is an NIH-funded physician-scientist at the University of Southern California with a research interest in Drug-Induced Liver Injury and Autoimmune Liver Diseases. She is a graduate of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, Iran. She completed Internal Medicine Residency at Griffin Hospital, a Yale-affiliated program in CT and Gastroenterology Fellowship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She became interested in liver disease during her residency, she was particularly fascinated by Drug-Induced Liver Injury (DILI) and hepatotoxicity and joined the laboratory of Dr. Neil Kaplowitz during fellowship, where she studied the signaling mechanisms and cell death subroutines in the context of hepatotoxicity from acetaminophen-induced acute liver injury. She finished her post-doctoral fellowship in the Kaplowitz laboratory in 2016 and started her own lab after obtaining her K08 from the NIDDK. She is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Medicine and studies mechanisms of liver injury and hepatotoxicity with a particular focus on immune checkpoint inhibitors using basic, animal model, and translational approaches. Clinically, she is interested in the complex presentation and difficult treatment of Autoimmune Hepatitis (AIH) and PBC and their variant syndromes, particularly in the underserved and minority Latinx populations in east Los Angeles. She is currently a Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network (DILIN) co-Investigator at USC. Beyond her research and clinical work, she is an active member of the liver community. She serves on the editorial board of Gastroenterology and JHep reports, is a peer reviewer on the NIH’s LiverTox website Expert Review Committee, a member of the AASLD Foundation Research Awards Committee, and Chair of the AASLD Hepatotoxicity Special Interest Group.
Financial Disclosures:
The American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) has implemented a system to resolve conflicts of interest for each CME activity to help ensure content is objective, fair balanced, independent, and free of commercial bias. Conflicts, if any, are resolved through one or more processes. All relevant conflicts pertaining to this activity have been mitigated.
Lily Dara:
Research Grants: Intercept Pharmaceuticals
Scientific Consultant: Intercept Pharmaceuticals
Christine Hunt:
Scientific Consultant: Otsuka, Akebia, Palladio, Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, Intercept, Galmed, Surrozen, F2G LTD, Genentech
John Toffalletti:
Scientific Consultant: Werfen, Roche