Rohit Sinha PhD

Rohit Anthony Sinha, PhD joined SGPGIMS in 2018 in the Dept of Endocrinology. He is also a Wellcome Trust/ DBT India alliance Fellow. Dr. Sinha has over 17 years of experience in the field of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Dr. Sinha presently has 95 publications to his credit, which include Research articles, Reviews, and Book chapters. Dr. Sinha has served as a Grant reviewer for the Medical Research Council, UK, Wellcome Trust/DBT, and for several journals such as Scientific Reports, PloS ONE, BBA, Frontiers in Physiology, Thyroid, and World Journal of Gastroenterology.

The major focus of Dr. Sinha’s research is on studying the endocrine regulation of metabolism with special emphasis on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). His findings showed that thyroid hormone increases basal metabolism and hepatic lipid clearance through autophagy (Sinha RA et al., JCI, 2012, Sinha RA et al., Autophagy, 2015). This was the first description of hormonal regulation of lipid metabolism through “lipophagy.” This finding research helped to explain the basis of previous clinical associations between thyroid dysfunction and fatty liver diseases. At a translational level, it opened an intriguing possibility of using thyroid analogous for the treatment of metabolic disorders like fatty liver disease in humans. This work has provided the theoretical rationale for a Phase II clinical trial on using thyroid hormone in patients with NAFLD and type II diabetes (Bruinstroop et al., 2018, JCEM) of which Dr. Sinha was a part. Furthermore, his work has been extensively cited in recent Phase III clinical trials with thyroid hormone analog Resmetirom for the treatment of NAFLD (Harrison et al., 2019, Lancet). His discovery of caffeine as a pro-autophagic drug for reversing fatty liver diseases was reported and highlighted by national forums and several news agencies worldwide, Faculty of 1000, and commentaries published in Hepatology & Nature Review Gastroenterology & Hepatology. This manuscript is the fourth-highest-scoring manuscript in Hepatology regardless of publication date and the highest-scoring one for its length of time since publication as rated by Altmetrics which measures citations and coverage in the scientific literature and public media.