Educational activities

Monthly International Seminar Series on Liver Toxicity and Steatotic Liver Disease and different EASL studio topics for DHILI will be organised at a later stage.

As a proposal within our educational activities, we will be launching from January a series of talks on Liver Toxicity and Steatotic Liver Disease, ONCE monthly, given by international experts in the field. The session outline would be a talk of around 45 min with 15 min left for discussion. Conferences will be held on the 3rd Wednesday of each month at 16.30h (CET) starting from January 17^th 2024.

These international seminar series are the result of an outstanding collaboration between the EASL DHILI Consortium (https://easldhiliconsortium.eu/) and the Halt-RONIN (UKRI-Horizon Europe) https://halt-ronin.com/

The objectives are:

• to improve collaboration between different group experts encompassing clinical investigators, researchers, basic scientists, industry partners and regulators.
• To foster scientific progress by disseminating the latest breakthroughs in research on hepatotoxicity and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease

Leo van Grunsven obtained his Biology degree in 1992 from the University of Utrecht and obtained his PhD in 1996 from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France). He had his postdoctoral training at the NINDS/NIH (Bethesda, USA) and the KU Leuven (Belgium) and joined the lab of the late Prof. Albert Geerts at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB, Belgium) in 2006, and became an assistant Professor in 2009 and heads the Liver Cell Biology research group since.

His group studies molecular mechanisms involved in liver -homeostasis, -fibrosis and –regeneration with a special focus on hepatic stellate cells. His group was the first to identify autophagy, AGE- and HIPPO-signaling as key mechanisms involved in hepatic stellate cell activation during liver fibrogenesis. His team established the first hepatocyte-injury dependent in vitro liver fibrosis model by using spheroid cultures of human hepatocytes and hepatic stellate cells (2016). Current research efforts include the development of more advanced in vitro systems for chronic liver disease using primary mouse and iPSC-derived liver cells, and investigation of stress pathways in hepatic stellate cells and other sinusoidal liver cells during acute and chronic liver injury.