Dr Gerry Lake-Bakaar

Dr Gerry Lake-Bakaar

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Dr. Lake-Bakaar has worked extensively in both clinical and laboratory research. He served as Medical Research Council lecturer to Dame Sheila Sherlock (1977-1982) and as Solomon A. Berson Fellow (1980-81) with Rosalyn Yalow (Nobel laureate in medicine and physiology 1977). He worked in the pharmaceutical industry from 1982 to 1985 as director of medical affairs to Janssen Pharmaceutica, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, a Fortune 500 company with a renowned reputation for its training in business and management skills. In 1992, he founded the website http://www.findadoc.com/. He was chief of gastroenterology and head of the Hepato-Biliary program at VA Medical Center Northport, from January 1990 to March 2003, and concomitantly was director of the GI fellowship program at Health Sciences Center, State University of Stony Brook.

Dr. Lake-Bakaar has had extensive experience in the practice of clinical gastroenterology, including advanced techniques such as endoscopic retrograde cholangio-pancreatography. More recently, from 2003 to 2007, he worked at the Center for the Study of Hepatitis C, which combined clinical research in the Division of GI-Hepatology at Weill Cornell Medical College with the highest quality of basic science research in HCV virology in the Charles M. Rice laboratory at Rockefeller University. This broad experience at the highest level in clinical medicine, basic science and applied science within the pharmaceutical industry has afforded him a unique perspective in academic medicine.

Among his original research was the first description of AIDS gastropathy, which established hypochlorhydria in patients with HIV infection and led to the demonstration that significant improvement in ketoconazole bioabsorption ensued when the drug was given with dilute hydrochloric acid.

His current research interests center on chronic hepatitis C liver disease and the role of B cells in controlling chronic hepatitis C viremia. He is also focused on the development of methods for harnessing secondary host immune response to control viremia in both chronic hepatitis B and B infections. He is currently hepatologist, transplant hepatologist and co-director of a liver tumor center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Updated 25 August 2023