Rodrigo Vieira Motta

After graduating from medical school in Brazil in 2020, I was accepted into Principles and Practice of Clinical Research (PPCR), a programme offered by Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health. There I learned essential abilities related to all aspects of clinical studies, from translational research to late phase clinical trials and observational studies using real-world evidence.

I am a clinical trials research fellow at the Translational Gastroenterology and Liver Unit, being directly involved with patients enrolled in clinical trials funded by academia and industry. In addition to my patient-facing capacities, I am involved in designing and running observational studies in autoimmune and metabolic liver diseases, thus joining my background as a clinician with my passion for research methodology and biostatistics.

I am also part of the IgG4-related disease group. We study the pathophysiology of this recently described disease and use translational approaches to identify potential prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets. In collaboration with the Satsangi group, we are analysing the methylome of patients with IgG4-RD and seek to identify profiles of DNA methylation specific to IgG4-RD involving the liver, pancreas and bile ducts in comparison to patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis, which is the main differential diagnosis. Furthermore, we also investigate the use of technologies already validated in other liver diseases, such as transient elastography and scores based on blood biomarkers, to assess tissue inflammation and fibrosis in patients with IgG4-RD, which put them in danger of loss of function in organs affected by the disease.