Current Opinion in Gastroenterology was launched in 1985. It is one of a successful series of review journals whose unique format is designed to provide a systematic and critical assessment of the literature as presented in the many primary journals. The field of gastroenterology is divided into 12 sections that are reviewed once a year. Each section is assigned a Section Editor, a leading authority in the area, who identifies the most important topics at that time. Here we are pleased to introduce one of the Section Editors for this issue. SECTION EDITORS Don RockeyDon RockeyDr Don Rockey completed internship, residency, chief residency, and fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, USA. He is currently Chief of the Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases and holds the Dr Carey G. King, Jr. and Dr Henry M. Winans, Sr. Chair in Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern, USA. He has active basic and clinical research interests in liver disease. He has worked on areas ranging from clinical management problems in liver diseases such as portal hypertension, hepatic blood flow, drug induced liver injury and complications of chronic liver disease to basic liver cell and molecular biology. The central theme of his laboratory research revolves around understanding the cell and molecular wounding response of the liver to injury. His laboratory initially demonstrated that a key player, the hepatic stellate cell, exhibits a contractile phenotype. Further, following liver injury, stellate cells exhibit exaggerated contractility, constrict liver sinusoids, and contribute to increased intrahepatic vascular resistance typical of portal hypertension. He and his laboratory have gone on to explore many molecular events important in this disease. They showed that stellate cells express cell surface receptors for endothelin-1, a peptide that mediates contraction. They also demonstrated that stellate cells respond to nitric oxide (NO) by relaxation. Moreover, the laboratory has also uncovered an endothelial phenotype typical of liver injury, characterized by impaired production of NO due to a defect in endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) function. The primary event in the sequence is increased G-protein-coupled receptor kinase-2 (GRK-2) expression; GRK-2 in turn inhibits the activity of Akt, the kinase necessary for activation of eNOS. Knockout of GRK-2 or overexpression of Akt in vivo reverses portal hypertension, confirming the pathological sequence. Dr Rockey has published over 150 peer reviewed scientific papers related to this work. He has had a number of editorial responsibilities, including as Associate Editor of Hepatology, and serving on various editorial boards. Gregory J. GoresGregory J. GoresGregory J. Gores, MD, Reuben R. Eisenberg Endowed Professor of Medicine and Physiology, is Chair of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, USA. A native of North Dakota, he received his undergraduate (Phi Beta Kappa) and MD (Alpha Omega Alpha) degrees from the University of North Dakota, USA. He received his training in internal medicine and gastroenterology at Mayo, Rochester, Minnesota. During his gastroenterology fellowship he was an NIH fellow in the laboratory of Dr Nicholas F. LaRusso. Before assuming a faculty position at Mayo in 1988, he was a Mayo Foundation Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA in the laboratory of John J. LeMasters, PhD, MD. A member of the American Association for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, he is a past president of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), and a member of the Gastroenterology Research Group (GRG) Steering Committee. He has also served on committees for the American Gastroenterological Association and the American Society of Transplantation, and chaired the Hepatobiliary Pathobiology NIH Study Section. Due to his breadth and depth of interests, he has served as an Associate Editor for Hepatology on two separate terms and once for Gastroenterology, the leading journals in their fields. He is the past recipient of a highly prestigious and competitive NIH MERIT Award and the Principal Investigator of three current R01 grants from the NIH. He has co-authored more than 250 original articles and over 200 editorials, reviews and book chapters. Through 2009, his work has been cited over 14,000 times. Well respected as a mentor, he has mentored over 60 post-doctoral research and clinical fellows and visited innumerable national and international academic institutions. His clinical and research contributions include advances in our understanding of hepatobiliary malignancies, liver transplantation and mechanisms of liver cell injury.
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Aug 17, 2012
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Open Access