Scientific and Clinical AdvisorsScientific and clinical advisors

Dr Asselah is a Full Professor of Medicine and Hepatology at Hôpital Beaujon, APHP, Clichy, France and at the University of Paris Diderot, France, and further is Head of Viral Hepatitis at INSERM (UMR 1149, Centre de Recherche sur l’Inflammation). Dr Asselah’s fields of research include chronic liver diseases, translational medicine, and treatment of HBV and HCV infections with new direct-acting antivirals, for which he has been involved as a coordinator/principal investigator in several clinical trials. Of note, he has coordinated major international clinical trials on HCV genotype 4 infection. Dr Asselah has published over 250 articles in the field of chronic liver diseases in major journals such as, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Gastroenterology, Hepatology, the Journal of Hepatology, among others and was selected as a rising star in gastroenterology in 2009 by United European Gastroenterology (UEG) in appreciation of his outstanding scientific work. He received awards for his genomic studies on HCV in 2005 from the French Association for the Liver Disease (AFEF), and for his leadership in hepatology in 2019 from the Czech Hepatology Society. Dr Asselah is a Doctor of Medicine and holds a PhD in virology.

Dr Brown is the Vincent Astor Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College, his Doctor of Medicine degree from New York University, and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr Brown did his residency at Beth Israel Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and a fellowship in gastroenterology and hepatology at The University of California, San Francisco. 

He has coauthored over 200 peer-reviewed articles and is the Editor-In-Chief for Liver Transplantation. He also received the Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Transplant Physicians, the Senior Attending Teaching Award at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, and the American Liver Foundation New York Chapter Physician of the Year.

Dr De La Rosa is the Chairman of the Board of Directors and a cofounder of Antios Therapeutics. He was most recently Antios’ Chief Executive Officer and led it from an early-stage idea to a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company. Prior to Antios, Dr De La Rosa was Chief Scientific Officer of Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory (DRIVE) and the Emory Institute for Drug Development (EIDD), focused on the discovery and development of antiviral drugs for the treatment of viral diseases of unmet medical need and global concern. During his nearly 6-year tenure at Emory University, he helped raise over $40 million in funding and was a coinventor on technologies licensed to AbbVie and Antios.

Prior to joining Emory University, Dr De La Rosa was Senior Vice President of Business Development and Scientific Affairs at Pharmasset. From 2002 until its acquisition by Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: GILD) for $11 billion in 2012, he was responsible for licensing, strategic transactions, and alliance management of collaborations and partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and universities. He provided business and scientific leadership to drug development programs for the treatment of HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C, including sofosbuvir. Prior to Pharmasset, Dr De La Rosa held both scientific and business positions at Visible Genetics, where he was responsible for the development and improvement of genotyping tests for HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C, including the first sequencing-based HIV drug resistance test to receive FDA approval. He also held scientific positions at Innogenetics, Boston Biomedica, and Digene, developing molecular diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. He is an inventor and author on several US patents and publications relating to molecular diagnostic methods, techniques, and therapeutics for infectious diseases and cancer. Dr De La Rosa has served on Scientific Advisory Boards and Board of Directors of biotechnology companies.

Dr De La Rosa earned a Fogarty Fellowship and an Intramural Research Training Award Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health, where he completed post-doctoral training in the Laboratory of Biochemistry and the Laboratory of Pathology of the National Cancer Institute. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Microbiology from the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in Microbiology from Miami University.

Dr Feld trained in GI and Hepatology at the University of Toronto and did post-doctoral training in the Liver Diseases Branch at the National Institutes of Health in laboratory and clinical research in viral hepatitis. After completing a Master in Public Health degree at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, he returned to Toronto. He is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and he holds the R. Phelan Chair in Translational Liver Research as a clinician-scientist at the Toronto Centre for Liver Disease in the Toronto General Hospital. In this role, Dr Feld leads a large clinical and translational research program focused primarily on viral hepatitis and its complications.

Dr Gish was first in Pharmacy School at the University of Kansas and then obtained his medical degree from the University of Kansas Medical School in Kansas City, Kansas. He completed a 3-year internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Diego, and a 4-year gastroenterology and hepatology fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles, which included transplant medicine.

Dr Gish is a fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, the American Society of Transplantation, and American College of Physicians. 

He has served on the editorial boards of American Journal of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, Journal of Hepatology, Digestive Diseases and Sciences, and Gastroenterology, among many others. He also coauthored a public health policy for liver health in Vietnam focusing on HBV, and is also assisting with the development of viral hepatitis health care policies in Georgia, Armenia, and the Philippines. 

Dr Gish was a major early contributor to decipher methods for the detection of HBV and HCV and characterizing their epidemiology and clinical presentation in humans. He was involved in studies that led to the genotypic classification strategies and methods now used worldwide. He has published more than 700 original articles, abstracts, and book chapters.

Currently, Dr Gish is an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Nevada Schools of Medicine in Las Vegas and in Reno. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Pharmacy at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UCSD, a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Loma Linda University. In addition, he is the Medical Director of the Asia Pacific Health Foundation in San Diego, CA and of the Hepatitis B Foundation in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Dr Gish is currently seeing patients, both in-person and via telemedicine, at various clinics in San Diego, Folsom, Fresno, San Jose, Santa Rosa, and Las Vegas/Reno. He is a staff physician at La Maestra, a federally qualified health center in San Diego. Dr Gish also serves as a Board Member of the Vietnam Viral Hepatitis Alliance (VVHA).

Luca G. Guidotti (LGG) is an experimental pathologist of international renown. LGG spent many years as part of the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) faculty in La Jolla, California, and he currently serves as Deputy Scientific Director of the largest private research institute in Italy, the IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele (OSR) in Milan, Italy. Over the years, LGG has published his work in prestigious scientific journals such as Cell, Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Experimental Medicine, and others, and his research activities have been financed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the European Research Council (ERC). LGG has been a member of numerous study sections at the NIH and the ERC for the allocation of funds to biomedical research.

Dr Peters works in the NIH AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) Hepatitis Transformative Science Group (TSG) where she has been a driving force in the development of US and international studies for new drugs for patients with HBV, with and without HIV. She is an Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Northwestern University. She received her Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery degree and her Doctorate of Medicine from Melbourne University Medical School in Melbourne, Australia. She is a hepatologist with a particular interest in viral hepatitis. Her research focuses on viral hepatitis in complicated clinical settings, patients with comorbid conditions including alcoholism and HIV infection. She has numerous publications on viral hepatitis with and without HIV coinfection in peer-reviewed journals with multiple collaborators.

Nancy Reau, MD, is Professor of Internal Medicine, Associate Director of Solid Organ Transplantation, and Section Chief of Hepatology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, IL. She received her medical degree from The Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus, where she completed a residency and fellowship in gastroenterology/hepatology, followed by a second fellowship in advanced transplant hepatology at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. Her primary research interests focus on viral hepatitis, liver transplantation, and complications of chronic liver disease. Dr Reau has authored or coauthored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles that have been published in journals such as Hepatology, Hepatitis Research and Treatment, and Clinics in Liver Disease.

She has been an invited lecturer at numerous presentations focused on fatty liver disease, viral hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver transplantation. Dr Reau is a fellow of the American Gastroenterological Association, the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG), and American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). She currently serves as the editor for the AASLD multimedia journal, Clinical Liver Disease. Additionally, she was a member of the AASLD’s practice guideline committee, the chair of the AASLD public policy committee, and the American College of Gastroenterology women’s committee. She is co-chair of the Medical Advisory Committee of the American Liver Foundation, Illinois Chapter. 

Dr Kathie Seley-Radtke is a Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her medicinal chemistry research focuses on targeting coronaviruses, filoviruses, and flaviviruses among other infectious diseases, including HBV, using her novel “fleximer” scaffolds. The fleximers have shown potent, broad-spectrum activity across many families of viruses, and due to their flexibility, can retain their potency even in the face of point mutations. Over the last 30 years, Dr Seley-Radtke has served on more than 70 NIH and other federal funding agency review panels. She also served as President for the International Society for Nucleosides, Nucleotides & Nucleic Acids (IS3NA). Currently, Dr Seley-Radtke is the President-Elect of the International Society for Antiviral Research (ISAR), and a Co-Chair for the 2023 Gordon Research Conference on Nucleosides, Nucleotides & Oligonucleotides. 

Mark Sulkowski, MD, is a Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. He also serves as the Medical Director of the Viral Hepatitis Center in the Divisions of Infectious Diseases and Gastroenterology/Hepatology in the Department of Medicine and is the Associate Dean for Research in the Capital Region (CAPRES). Professor Sulkowski received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA (1992), pursued training in Internal Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC (1995), and completed his Fellowship in Infectious Diseases (1998) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Professor Sulkowski has been the principal investigator for more than 120 clinical trials related to the management of viral hepatitis B and C in persons with and without HIV coinfection. He was the global principal investigator for more than a dozen trials, including the largest clinical trial of agents for the treatment of hepatitis C (NEJM, 2009) and the vanguard study of combination therapy with direct inhibitors of the HCV NS5A and NS5B non-structural proteins (NEJM, 2014). Professor Sulkowski also served as the chair of the Hepatitis Transformative Sciences Group of the National Institutes of Health-funded adult AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) where he led translational studies of liver disease, namely hepatitis B and C virus. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (2011) and the American Association of Physicians (2017).

Professor Sulkowski is a member of numerous professional societies including the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL), and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).  With more than 300 peer-reviewed articles, he is widely published with works in Annals of Internal Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Journal of Hepatology, and Hepatology. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, he was named as a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Analytics) defined as the being in the top 1% of global researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences based on the number of citations for papers. As an invited lecturer, he has been frequently invited to present at major national and international medical congresses and has educated learners in more than 25 countries. 

John Tavis, PhD, is a Professor of Molecular Virology at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine and Director of the Saint Louis University Institute for Drug and Biotherapeutic Innovation. He received his doctorate in molecular biology from Pennsylvania State University in 1990 and did postdoctoral studies into the molecular virology of hepatitis B virus at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr Tavis is the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Council for the annual International Hepatitis B Virus Meeting, Incoming Chair of the International Coalition to Eliminate HBV (ICE-HBV), and a member of the Scientific and Medical Advisory Board for the Hepatitis B Foundation and Baruch S. Blumberg Institute. He is also on the editorial boards of the Journal of Virology and Antiviral Research. In 2013, Dr Tavis was the recipient of the Naomi Judd Award for his efforts to control HBV. His longstanding efforts on behalf of the American Cancer Society led to receipt of the Society’s Mission Hero Award in 2018. He has studied the HBV replication mechanisms, HBV reverse transcriptase’s metabolism and non-catalytic roles in the cell, and biochemistry of viral reverse transcription since 1992. He has authored over 100 scientific papers and is an inventor on 10 awarded or pending patent applications. His current work focuses on the basic biochemistry of the HBV ribonuclease H and developing drugs to suppress HBV replication that target this essential enzyme. 

Professor Yuen obtained his first Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1992. He further pursued his academic excellence by obtaining 3 doctoral degrees, including Doctor of Medicine with Sir Patrick Manson Gold Medal in 2001, Doctor of Philosophy in 2005, and Doctor of Science in 2017.

Professor Yuen's research interests include prevention, natural history, serology, virology, and treatment of chronic hepatitis B and C, and hepatocellular carcinoma. He is one of the top internationally renowned researchers in the field of hepatitis B. He has now published more than 450 papers in world renowned medical journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Lancet Infectious Diseases, and Lancet Oncology.

As a world-class clinician scientist, Professor Yuen is now leading most of the international trials examining new drugs, including antiviral and immunomodulatory agents for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B. He is also actively performing cutting edge research on novel markers for hepatitis B infection and occult hepatitis B infection.

With all these international academic and professional achievements, Professor Yuen is an invited member serving as key opinion leader for several international coalition committees on hepatitis B. Professor Yuen was also honorably invited by The Novel Assembly at Karolinska Institute to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for both 2020 and 2021.

As a specialist of gastroenterology and hepatology, Professor Yuen has been providing clinical care and services for patients in Queen Mary Hospital, The University of Hong Kong, for more than 20 years. He also serves as a medical advisor and consultant for different health-related sectors of the Government of Hong Kong, including many academic centers and commercial enterprises related to different aspects of gastroenterology and hepatology. In recent years, he has been greatly involved in assisting  development of innovation and technology in Hong Kong by acting as an active member for the Innovation and Technology Fund, The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Fabien Zoulim obtained his Doctor of Medicine degree in Gastroenterology and Hepatology in Lyon Medical School in 1991. He has also obtained a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology and was trained as a post-doctoral researcher at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. He is Professor of Medicine at Lyon 1 University since 1997. He is currently Medical Director of the Hepatology Department at the Hospices Civils de Lyon, and Scientific Director of the Department of Immunology and Virology of INSERM Unit 1052, where he is leading the team on antiviral therapy of viral hepatitis. Dr Zoulim has served as an Associate Editor for Journal of Hepatology and is currently Associate Editor for Gut. He also served as an expert in the microbiology study section of the INSERM and is currently head of the clinical viral hepatitis study section at ANRS. He served as a Governing Board member of the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL). Dr Zoulim received the William Prusoff Award of the International Society for Antiviral Research. Furthermore, he has been the scientific coordinator of a European community-funded Network of Excellence on the management of antiviral drug resistance, and is currently head of the ANRS “HBV cure” program in France. Fabien Zoulim is a recognized expert in the field of viral hepatitis and antiviral therapy. He has published more than 350 articles.