Yury Popov, MD, PhD

Dr. Yury Popov's NIH-, industry- and private foundations funded laboratory's major research focus is on liver fibrosis/cirrhosis and its life-threatening sequelae. Specifically, his multidisciplinary 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. Popov laboratory is also actively working on the development, validation and optimization of small animal models of cirrhosis and liver cancer for novel drug target discovery and efficacy testing. His lab discovered several pathways responsible for fibrosis progression, including elucidation of the molecular mechanisms of fibrotic matrix stabilization and collagen cross-linking which make liver scarring irreversible, defining the role of TGFbeta-activating integrins in fibrosis progression and identification of mitochondrial DAMPs as a potent fibrogenic signal, with far reaching diagnostic and therapeutic implications.