Ilya Gukovsky, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles. He immigrated to the USA in 1992 from the former Soviet Union where he worked at the Institute of Biological Physics, USSR Academy of Sciences, on the energetics of interactions in nucleic acids. After training in molecular biology at the laboratory of Dr. Michael G. Rosenfeld (UC San Diego), he joined Pancreatic Research Group when it moved in 1996 to UCLA/VA West Los Angeles. Since then, his studies are focused on molecular and cellular mechanisms of pancreatitis, as reflected in numerous papers, reviews, editorials, and book chapters. His research was supported by grants from the NIH and VA; in particular, Dr. Gukovsky was instrumental in obtaining the first ever NIH multi-institutional (Program) grant on the pathogenic mechanism of pancreatitis, “Organelle Disorders in Pancreatitis.”

Dr. Gukovsky’s studies revealed how injured acinar cells, through activation of the key transcription factor NF-κB and cytokine production, trigger the inflammatory response of pancreatitis. A major area of his research for the last 15 years, together with Dr. Anna Gukovskaya, has been on the role in pancreatitis of impaired autophagy, a lysosome-mediated pathway that is especially important for pancreatic acinar cells which rely on coordinated actions of protein synthesis, storage and degradation for secretory function. Most recently, we published a critical comprehensive review analyzing the role of trypsin in pancreatitis.