Research Summary
Dr. Moon is a transplant hepatologist, clinical researcher, and Assistant Professor of Medicine on the tenure track at the University of North Carolina (UNC). The overall goal of his career is to improve outcomes among patients with liver disease. He has used the national Veterans Affairs system, to assess the benefits of HCC surveillance with abdominal ultrasound with or without serum AFP using a matched case-control design, demonstrating that a similar proportion of cases (patients who died of HCC) and controls (patients who did not die of HCC) underwent screening ultrasound, serum AFP, or either test prior to diagnosis. He led work on mortality trends from alcohol-associated liver diseases (ALD), utilizing national death certificate data to demonstrate that deaths from ALD were rising prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and these increases accelerated after March 2020. To better understand the outcomes in patients with liver disease and COVID-19, he launched an international registry named SECURE-Cirrhosis in March 2020 and collaborated with investigators from the UK who led the COVID-Hep registry. This collaboration led to several manuscripts including work demonstrating that baseline liver disease severity and alcohol-related liver disease are strongly associated with mortality in patients with COVID-19. T Data from the registry was used for a study published in Nature that demonstrated that FXR inhibitors, such as ursodiol, may be a therapeutic target in the management of COVID-19.
CGIBD Focus Area(s): Clinical/Translational Research
Pilot and Feasibility Award 2021
Collaborators: Barnes, Barritt Brenner, Dellon, Kappelman, Peery, Sandler, Shaheen
