Collaborators

Dr. Arab is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Medicine, Schulich School of Medicine, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. Trained at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Chile and Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA. Dr. Arab is a Gastroenterology and Hepatology specialist, Transplant Hepatologist, and Clinical Researcher with an interest in clinical/translational research and epidemiology in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and alcohol-related liver disease.

He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed papers, co-authored several book chapters, and delivered lectures on liver-related topics at national and international meetings. He is an Associate Editor for Hepatology (flagship AASLD journal). He has also participated in the generation of clinical practice guidelines for alcohol-related liver disease, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and hepatorenal syndrome and regularly serves as an expert reviewer of research grants and scientific research abstracts for multiple societies, funding agencies, and international peer-reviewed journals.

Additionally, he is spearheading international collaboration groups aiming to study alcohol-associated liver disease and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (AH-LATIN and Global AlcHep BigData Network). Dr. Arab is a member of the AASLD Global Outreach and Engagement Committee. He is currently the Vice-Chair of the Special Interest Group on the alcohol-associated liver disease of the AASLD. Additionally, he is the President of the Chilean Hepatology Association and Vice-Chair of the Education & Scholarship Committee of the International Liver Transplantation Society (ILTS).

Dr. Panaccione is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Unit at the University of Calgary. He also serves as the Dean of MD Admissions and Director of the IBD Fellowship Program. He has been honored with the Crohn’s Colitis Canada Endowed Research Chair in Inflammatory Bowel Disease at the University of Calgary.

He is the 2020 Crohn’s Colitis Canada Outstanding Physician of the Year and has been recently recognized as a 2020-22 Clarivate Research Scholar for being cited in the top 1% of researchers cited in the world. He has co-authored over 350 manuscripts, 7 book chapters, and 426 abstracts including publications in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, Nature, and Annals of Internal Medicine.

He is a founding member of the Crohn’s Colitis Canada PACE initiative ( 5 million dollar grant) Dr. Panaccione is the principal investigator on several studies evaluating the efficacy and safety of new agents in subjects of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. His special interest lies in the fields of advanced therapies, biological therapy, and delivery of care. He is a recognized authority on IBD therapeutics and has co-authored numerous guidelines for the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology. He actively participates in clinical trials of new therapeutic agents for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.  He reviews for prestigious journals including NEJM, Lancet, Gastroenterology, and Gut.

Dr. Eileen Crowley completed her honours medical degree at the National University of Ireland and subspecialty training with the Royal College of Physicians, Ireland. Moving to SickKids, Toronto for fellowship training in Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition and submitted her Master’s thesis entitled ‘Towards Personalized Care in Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease’. She completed postdoctoral training and subspecialty Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease training in the laboratory of Dr Aleixo Muise and received CIHR grant funding for supports. She was co-supervised by Dr Anne Griffiths working on the Canadian (CIDsCaNN) IBD network.

Dr Crowley’s area of clinical specialty include pediatric IBD. Her research interests include pediatric IBD, the genetics of IBD, therapeutic drug monitoring and precision medicine. Her work has served to better delineate the genetic phenotype of children with IBD as well as optimizing response to therapy in this age group.
Dr Crowley works as a Pediatric Gastroenterologist at the Children’s Hospital, London Health Sciences, Ontario, as an Assistant Professor with Western University and Clinician Investigator in Pediatric IBD. Dr Crowley intends to pursue further research in index development and clinical trials in Pediatric IBD.

Dr. Albert J (Arjan) Bredenoord studied Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. He subsequently worked on several clinical research projects on gastrointestinal motility at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands which resulted in the completion of his PhD thesis on gastroesophageal reflux disease in 2006. His clinical training was performed in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands and at the Royal London Hospital in London, UK. He currently works as a consultant Gastroenterologist at the Amsterdam University Medical Center where he is dedicated to patients care, scientific research and education in the field of benign esophageal diseases. He was appointed professor of Neurogastroenterology & Motility at the University of Amsterdam in 2019.

Dr. Bredenoord’s main focus is on achalasia, reflux disease and eosinophilic esophagitis. The esophageal clinic in the AMC Amsterdam hosts the largest population of benign esophageal diseases in the Netherlands. Dr Bredenoord is an author of over 250 papers, books and book chapters on esophageal diseases and organizes regular courses in Europe, North America and Asia. Dr Bredenoord is President of the European Society of Eosinophilic Esophagitis EUREOS, a member of the UEG Scientific Committee and co-founder of the International HRM working group. He collaborates with Alimentiv on studies on endpoint development for clinical trials in eosinophilic esophagitis and advises on all stages of trial design in drug development for eosinophilic esophagitis.

Evan S. Dellon, MD, MPH, is a Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Dellon received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He performed a clinical and a research fellowship in Adult Gastroenterology at UNC, during which he also received a Masters of Public Health degree in Epidemiology from the UNC School of Public Health.

Dr. Dellon joined the UNC faculty and the Center for Esophageal Diseases and Swallowing (CEDAS) in 2008, where his main clinical focus is on disorders of swallowing, and in particular eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) and other eosinophilic gastrointestinal diseases (EGIDs). He became Director of CEDAS in 2014.

Dr. Dellon’s research interests span the epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes of EoE and EGIDs. The goal of his research is to improve the lives of patients with EoE/EGIDs by learning how to better diagnose, treat, and monitor the conditions. He is widely published in this area, with more than 265 peer-reviewed papers in the medical literature overall.

Dr. Dellon is also an Associate Editor for Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. He collaborates with and advises Alimentiv Clinical Trials on studies related to EoE and EGIDs, including the areas of trial design, patient outcomes, and endpoint development.

Dr. Rohit Loomba is a tenured Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology, and Adjunct Professor in the Division of Epidemiology at the University of California, San Diego. He is a leading expert in translational research and innovative clinical trial design in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and steatohepatitis (NASH).

Dr. Loomba 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 end-points, and integrated OMICs using microbiome, metabolome and lipidome. This integrated approach has led to several innovative applications such as establishment of MRI-PDFF as a non-invasive biomarker of treatment response in early phase trials in NASH, which has now been adopted in more than 25 clinical trials conducted worldwide. He holds two patents on non-invasive biomarkers of NAFLD and fibrosis.

His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health as a Principal Investigator currently leading three R01, a P01 and a U01 grant.

He is the Deputy Editor of hepatology, the official journal of the AASLD.

Dr. Loomba has published more than 250 manuscripts and has an H-index of 73. He is among the top 1% of the globally highly cited scientists across all fields in 2019 by Web of Science. He is an elected member of American Society of Clinical Investigation.

Dr. J Rimola is a radiologist who sub-specializes in abdominal and gastrointestinal imaging. He is a member of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease unit directed by Dr. Julian Panés in Barcelona. He has had a leading role in the application of cross-sectional imaging techniques to the study of Crohn’s disease, development and validation of activity indices, and implementation of MRE and pelvic MRI in multicentric clinical studies. He participated in the ECCO-ESGAR guidelines elaboration and in different other expert consensus and recommendations document.

Bruce Sands, MD, MS, is the Dr. Burrill B. Crohn Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY. Dr. Sands was awarded his BA and MD from Boston University, and trained in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. After completing GI fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital, he joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and served as the Acting Chief of the Gastrointestinal Unit at MGH before moving to Mount Sinai in 2010 as Chief of the Dr. Henry D. Janowitz Division of Gastroenterology.

Dr. Sands is widely recognized for his clinical investigations of new therapeutics for the inflammatory bowel diseases and has published over 275 original manuscripts. He was the lead investigator of the landmark studies ACCENT 2, UNIFI and VARSITY, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and SEAVUE, published in the Lancet.

Dr. Schaeffer is an associate professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at University of British Columbia and the Head of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH), where he practices as a gastrointestinal pathologist. Dr. Schaeffer obtained his medical degree from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. After a residency program in Anatomical Pathology in Vancouver, he completed his gastrointestinal pathology fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Schaeffer is the co-director of Pancreas Centre BC and the Pancreatic Cancer Research Chair at Vancouver General Hospital.