Dr Vishal Patel

Vishal Patel is a Consultant Hepatologist at the Liver Unit, King’s College Hospital, focusing on Advanced Chronic Liver Disease (ACLD) and managing those complications related to portal hypertension. He has tertiary centre training and experience at the Liver Unit at King’s College Hospital in complex hepatology, liver intensive care medicine and liver transplantation. He is a fully JAG accredited endoscopist and certified colonoscopy trainer with advanced upper and lower GI diagnostic and therapeutic endoscopy skills, including the management of refractory portal hypertensive bleeding. He is a Principal Investigator and Group Lead for Microbiome in ACLD with his lab based at the Roger Williams Institute of Hepatology, and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer within the School of Immunology & Microbial Sciences at King’s College London.

His laboratory group focuses on translational research on the gut-liver axis in cirrhosis, evolving from his doctorate research which generated the recently published RifSys trial outcomes, and the life-threatening infection-related complications that patients with ACLD face their exposure. This is in an era of ongoing high level antibiotic use as a cornerstone of treatment and the ever-escalating threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). His group is now focused on metagenomic profiling with primary interests based around characterising and understanding the pathophysiological role of the microbiome in driving chronic liver failure syndromes, and non-antimicrobial-based therapeutic interventions that can more effectively target oral-gut dysbiosis, pathological bacterial translocation and immune dysfunction. Linked to this is the ongoing ‘Rapid Infection Diagnostics in Cirrhosis’ (RIDiC) study evaluating the role of novel sequencing-based approaches as a means to combat AMR.

Vishal is involved in several observational and interventional studies in chronic liver failure syndromes, including acute alcoholic hepatitis, hepatic encephalopathy, and faecal microbial transplantation in cirrhosis. He has significant trial set up and delivery experience having also been involved in non-hepatology interventional trial delivery during the COVID19 pandemic. He is Chief Investigator of the NIHR-funded £2.2 million BOPPP trial (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03776955) evaluating the effectiveness of non-selective beta-blockers to prevent variceal haemorrhage in patients with small oesophageal varices and cirrhosis. BOPPP is currently one of the largest trials in portal hypertension glboally, aiming to recruit 1,200 patients at 55 UK sites with the trial set to run over a 6-year period.