Jingwen Liu
Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, USA
Biography
Jingwen Liu is a Principal Investigator at the Palo Alto VA Hospital where she directs a research program seeking new therapeutic options to treat cardiometabolic diseases through studies conducted in liver cells and various animal models. Among numerous accomplishments, her team has characterized a new cellular pathway that upregulates the liver LDL receptor transcription through a cholesterol-independent mechanism and identified a novel post-transcriptional mechanism of LDLR gene that mediates the cholesterol-lowering effects of herbal medicine berberine. In the last decade, PCSK9 has emerged as a new therapeutic target for treating hypercholesterolemia. Her research in characterizing the transcriptional mechanism of PCSK9 has brought new insight for developing novel therapeutic approach to inhibit PCSK9 biosynthesis with a potential to improve the efficacy of current cholesterol- lowering drug statins. Her recent study in obeticholic acid has led to new understandings of lipid regulatory effects of FXR agonists in hyperlipidemic patients.