PhD defence C.F. (Carla) Murillo Perez

Primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) is a chronic cholestatic liver disease that predominantly affects 1 in 1000 women over the age of 40. Due its relative rarity and slow progression to clinical events, studying this disease in a robust manner would require inclusion of a large number of patients with long-term follow-up, which can be difficult from single-center studies. Thus, a culmination of patient data from multiple centers and in an international manner can be greatly informative and aid in the generalizability of findings. Such efforts have been achieved with national and international groups such as the UK-PBC Consortium, CaNAL, and as evaluated in this thesis, the Global PBC Study Group. Importantly, the predictive ability of main liver biomarkers, alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and bilirubin, as surrogate end points for clinical outcomes in PBC patients was studied in the Global PBC Study group database.1 These are now widely used in clinical practice and clinical trials, both to determine the need for second-line therapies and to evaluate the efficacy of treatment. Ultimately, the goal is to optimize patients’ prognosis through guidance of patient management, which can be accomplished with care pathways, identification of risk factors, determination of the need of second-line therapies, and establishment of biochemical treatment targets.

Due to corona, the PhD defences do not take place publicly in the usual way in the Senate Hall of the Professor Andries Querido Room. The candidates will defend their dissertation either in a small group or online.