Katherine Phoenix Liao, MD, MPH

Katherine Liao, MD, MPH

Associate Professor of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School (Secondary)

Brigham and Women's Hospital Rheumatology - PBB-B3 75 Francis St Boston, MA

Katherine Liao is a clinical investigator and practicing rheumatologist. The mission of her lab her lab is two-fold: (1) is to study rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and the clinical and genetic factors that lead to outcomes such as cardiovascular disease and severe joint damage, and (2) is to apply and develop bioinformatics methods to utilize big data for clinical and translational research studies. Liao’s research focuses on applying methods such as natural language processing to electronic medical record (EMR) data to perform clinical studies in RA and other conditions. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in patients with RA. This high risk has been attributed to inflammation, which is an important risk factor for heart disease in the general population. Determining these links can identify strategies to reduce CV risk in RA, as well as lead to potential targets of treatment in the general population. Liao is the PI of the R01 funded study, Lipids, Inflammation and CV risk in RA (LiiRA). The goal of LiiRA is to investigate how inflammation may modify important traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as cholesterol and blood pressure, and the impact of these modifications on CV risk. She is also a co-investigator on an NIH U01 multi-center RCT, Treatment Against RA and Effect on FDG PET CT (TARGET). TARGET specifically tests the hypothesis that reducing inflammation, reduces vascular inflammation and CV risk in RA. In line with her research interests, Liao is co-Director of the Cardiovascular Rheumatology Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Through her work with the Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) project, Liao led the team to develop an EMR research platform for RA studies. This platform integrated clinical and biomarker data (e.g. clinical EMR data, genetics, autoantibody data) allowing for both traditional genetic association studies as well as new approaches for data analyses such as the Phenome Wide Association Study (PheWAS). Using this platform, she collaborates closely with investigators from the fields of biostatistics and bioinformatics to apply novel methods to study focused clinical questions such as CVD in RA. Currently, she is leading a pilot project to port and further develop these methods at VA Boston Healthcare using nationwide VA data with a goal to establish an EMR research platform at the VA.

National Lipid Association Recommendations for Patient-Centered Management of Dyslipidemia: Part 2.
Authors: Jacobson TA, Maki KC, Orringer CE, Jones PH, Kris-Etherton P, Sikand G, La Forge R, Daniels SR, Wilson DP, Morris PB, Wild RA, Grundy SM, Daviglus M, Ferdinand KC, Vijayaraghavan K, Deedwania PC, Aberg JA, Liao KP, McKenney JM, Ross JL, Braun LT, Ito MK, Bays HE, Brown WV, Underberg JA.
J Clin Lipidol
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Common Genetic Variants Influence Circulating Vitamin D Levels in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.
Authors: Ananthakrishnan AN, Cagan A, Cai T, Gainer VS, Shaw SY, Churchill S, Karlson EW, Murphy SN, Kohane I, Liao KP, Xavier RJ.
Inflamm Bowel Dis
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Toward high-throughput phenotyping: unbiased automated feature extraction and selection from knowledge sources.
Authors: Yu S, Liao KP, Shaw SY, Gainer VS, Churchill SE, Szolovits P, Murphy SN, Kohane IS, Cai T.
J Am Med Inform Assoc
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Diabetes and the risk of infections with immunomodulator therapy in inflammatory bowel diseases.
Authors: Ananthakrishnan AN, Cagan A, Cai T, Gainer VS, Shaw SY, Churchill S, Karlson EW, Murphy SN, Kohane I, Liao KP.
Aliment Pharmacol Ther
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Association between lipid levels and major adverse cardiovascular events in rheumatoid arthritis compared to non-rheumatoid arthritis patients.
Authors: Liao KP, Liu J, Lu B, Solomon DH, Kim SC.
Arthritis Rheumatol
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Clinical characteristics of RA patients with secondary SS and association with joint damage.
Authors: Brown LE, Frits ML, Iannaccone CK, Weinblatt ME, Shadick NA, Liao KP.
Rheumatology (Oxford)
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Development of phenotype algorithms using electronic medical records and incorporating natural language processing.
Authors: Liao KP, Cai T, Savova GK, Murphy SN, Karlson EW, Ananthakrishnan AN, Gainer VS, Shaw SY, Xia Z, Szolovits P, Churchill S, Kohane I.
BMJ
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Disease-modifying antirheumatic drug use and the risk of incident hyperlipidemia in patients with early rheumatoid arthritis: a retrospective cohort study.
Authors: Desai RJ, Eddings W, Liao KP, Solomon DH, Kim SC.
Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken)
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High-density genotyping of immune loci in Koreans and Europeans identifies eight new rheumatoid arthritis risk loci.
Authors: Kim K, Bang SY, Lee HS, Cho SK, Choi CB, Sung YK, Kim TH, Jun JB, Yoo DH, Kang YM, Kim SK, Suh CH, Shim SC, Lee SS, Lee J, Chung WT, Choe JY, Shin HD, Lee JY, Han BG, Nath SK, Eyre S, Bowes J, Pappas DA, Kremer JM, Gonzalez-Gay MA, Rodriguez-Rodriguez L, Ärlestig L, Okada Y, Diogo D, Liao KP, Karlson EW, Raychaudhuri S, Rantapää-Dahlqvist S, Martin J, Klareskog L, Padyukov L, Gregersen PK, Worthington J, Greenberg JD, Plenge RM, Bae SC.
Ann Rheum Dis
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Sparse kernel machine regression for ordinal outcomes.
Authors: Shen Y, Liao KP, Cai T.
Biometrics
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