Hepion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:HEPA) added four new internationally recognized thought leaders to its scientific advisory board (SAB), effective immediately.
These new members, who bring decades of liver disease research and drug development experience to the Hepion SAB, include:
Rohit Loomba, M.D., a Professor of Medicine; Director of Hepatology; Vice Chief, Division of Gastroenterology; and Founding Director of the NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease) Research Center at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He is the founding director of the UCSD NAFLD Research Center, where his team is conducting cutting edge research in all aspects of NAFLD, including non-invasive biomarkers, genetics, epidemiology, clinical trial design, imaging endpoints, and integrated OMICs using microbiome, metabolome and lipidome. Dr. Loomba has published more than 350 manuscripts and has an H-index of 99. He serves on the editorial boards of Gastroenterology, Journal of Hepatology, GUT, and Nature Reviews in Gastroenterology & Hepatology.
Vlad Ratziu, M.D., a Professor of Hepatology at Sorbonne University and Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, France. His main research interests are in the field of NAFLD; the mechanisms, risk factors, and progression of liver fibrosis in viral and metabolic diseases; and the treatment of viral hepatitis and HCC. He has participated in early-, mid-, and late-stage trials of NASH and has published more than 260 articles in prominent journals. He is a co-editor for the Journal of Hepatology and is an associate editor for Clinical Liver Disease.
Yury V. Popov, M.D., Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. He is also an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinaland Liver Physiology, and an ad hoc reviewer for over 30 scientific journals. Dr. Yury Popov’s laboratory’s major research focus is on liver fibrosis/cirrhosis and its life-threatening sequelae. Specifically, his team investigates the basic mechanisms of progression and regression of liver scarring, with the goal of the development of non-invasive diagnostic tools to measure these processes in the clinic, and novel therapies to prevent and reverse cirrhosis and its life-threatening complications, such as primary liver cancers.
Nikolai Naoumov, M.D., Ph.D., a physician-scientist with a professional career spanning academia, clinical care, and drug development – all focused on liver diseases. He is Fellow of both the Royal College of Physicians (London) and the Royal College of Pathologists (UK). His research has integrated immunology, molecular biology and translational medicine in elucidating virus-host interactions and mechanisms of liver injury. Most recently, Dr. Naoumov expanded his contributions to medical science and clinical hepatology as Global Head, Therapeutic Area Hepatology and Transplantation at Novartis.
The new Hepion SAB members join existing members Stephen Harrison, M.D., who is also chairman, and Philippe Gallay, Ph.D.
In a statement, Robert Foster, PharmD, Ph.D., Hepion’s CEO, said each of the four new SAB members brings a “wealth of invaluable experience, which we will rely on to help make many key decisions related to our rencofilstat NASH clinical programs, as well as to guide other areas of interest in fibrosis related diseases.”
