Discovering mechanisms behind liver disease
Dr. Shah's lab focuses on understanding how chronic liver injury drives disease at a cellular and organ level.
Overview
Research in the Integrative Biology of Advanced Liver Disease Laboratory focuses on several interrelated areas broadly pertaining to hepatic vascular biology and function. The liver is composed of several cell types, each with its own unique response and contribution to liver disease.
Our research builds on in vitro experiments to identify critical genes and processes that underlie cellular responses to liver injury and focuses on:
- The manner in which individual liver-cell types respond and contribute to liver disease
- Cross-talk between liver cells
- The identification and development of new hepatic treatment options by exploring underlying biology
To explore these issues, the lab uses multiomic approaches and big data analytics for hypothesis generation.
One major focus of the laboratory-based program relates to mechanisms regulating hepatic fibrogenesis in chronic liver diseases. Another major focus of the laboratory-based program relates to pericyte motility in hepatic microcirculatory remodeling and hepatic tumor angiogenesis. A third major focus of the clinical-based research program relates to alcohol-based liver disease. This includes understanding the cellular mechanisms underlying alcoholic liver disease, identifying biomarkers for diagnosing alcoholic liver disease and developing therapeutics for patients.
Affiliations
Dr. Shah's lab is affiliated with these other Mayo Clinic research areas:
About Dr. Shah
Vijay Shah, M.D., serves as chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Mayo Clinic's Minnesota campus in Rochester, Minnesota. He is a professor of medicine and physiology at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and also is the Mayo Clinic-endowed Carol M. Gatton Professor of Digestive Diseases Research.
Dr. Shah has maintained a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded program at Mayo Clinic for more than 20 years, which focuses broadly on alcohol-related liver disease, cirrhosis, portal hypertension and its complications with over 200 peer-review publications in distinguished journals such as the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, New England Journal of Medicine and others. Dr. Shah is a member of the prestigious American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians (AAP).