Professor Christopher Liddle

Chris' main area of research has been in the functional genomics of human drug metabolism and adaptive responses to toxic xenobiotic (foreign) and endobiotic (endogenous) chemical compounds. An extension of this work is to understand how the liver protects itself from toxic damage, as occurs in liver diseases where the flow of bile is obstructed (cholestatic liver diseases).

More recent work has focused on the role of nuclear hormone receptors in hepatic fibrogenesis, particularly the role of the Vitamin D Receptor as a therapeutic target to prevent progression to cirrhosis in patients with chronic liver disease. These research projects have resulted in five patent families, two of which have been commercialized, as well as many highly cited publications.

Chris also has interests in advanced information technology systems in the fields of biomedical research and clinical medicine. He is presently working on the bioinformatics of Next-Gen DNA sequencing technologies applied to gene regulation (e.g.; ChIP-Seq and RNA-Seq) and has contributed to very high impact publications, including recent papers in in the journals Nature, Nature Medicine, and Cell.