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Guest Speaker
DR. XAVIER FORNS
Xavier Forns, MD, graduated with a medical degree from the University of Barcelona in 1988 and completed his fellowship in Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the Liver Unit at the Hospital Clinic, Barcelona from 1990 to 1993.
After defending his doctoral thesis in 1995, he spent 4 years as a Research Fellow and Visiting Scientist at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA. During this period his main focus of research was the hepatitis C virus, with special emphasis on the characterization of the envelope proteins and the devel- opment of a vaccine. In 2000 Dr Forns joined the Liver Unit in Hospital Clinic of Barcelona as Liver Specialist Staff member, where he is now a Consultant.
Dr Forns is Associate Editor for the American Journal of Transplantation and serves as an editorial board member or reviewer for several other journals. He is a member of many professional societies, including the European Association for the Study of the Liver (Scientific Committee Member 2005–2008), the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. He is the current secretary of the Spanish Associa- tion for the Study of the Liver.
His main field of research and practice is hepatitis C recurrence in liver transplant recipients and he has made some significant contributions in the field, particularly on the natural history of the hepatitis C recurrence and its diagnosis and follow-up, as well as on therapeutic strategies to eradicate HCV infec- tion before and after liver transplantation. Dr Forns has published more than 100 papers in the subject area.