Vladimir M. Liarski

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor in Rheumatology with a strong background in Immunology. I am immensely interested in human translational research as it applies to the Idiopathic Inflammatory Myopathy (IIM) group of disorders and recently joined the Myositis Center at the University of Pittsburgh for this reason. My research focuses on the role of inflammation and the study of its’ organization, cellular make-up, and presence of cognate versus non-cognate immune interactions. The latter are dissected by means of high-throughput, computerized, and objective techniques based on multichannel immuno-fluorescent confocal microscopy image analysis. Together with my collaborators, I developed cutting edge approaches to the segmentation and analysis of in vivo cellular interactions using Convolutional Neural Networks and Deep Learning.

I also recently pioneered a new technique to digest frozen muscle biopsies to obtain intact immune cells for use in flow cytometry and downstream single cell applications. This technique was applied to comparatively study the in situ immune infiltrate in clinical Dermatomyositis and Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM) samples by means of single cell and single nuclear RNA Sequencing. This work is currently in revision for publication.

In addition to this, I assembled a longitudinal cohort of IIM patients from the VA Corporate Data Warehouse based on billing code and specialty clinic visit data. Using this, I showed that 732 Veterans with IBM were 18 times more likely to die from any cause as compared to age-, sex-, race-, and ethnicity-matched controls, reflecting the large healthcare and societal burdens of IBM. These findings have been recently accepted for publication in Military Medical Research. I am currently using the same resource to study a related type of inflammatory myositis in the form of anti-synthetase syndrome.