Lisl Shoda, Ph.D.
Vice President and Director of Immunology
Quantitative Systems Pharmacology

About Lisl
Dr. Shoda’s research focuses on predicting and improving the understanding of drug actions on innate and adaptive immune responses. The complexity in predicting drug effects is likely related in part to the pleiotropic effects of many immune mediators and the network of feedback systems evolutionarily designed to aggressively defend against a multitude of pathogens while minimizing auto-injurious or autoimmune reactions. One approach is to use in silico methods to reproduce immune responses through the explicit mapping of known effects and feedback networks. Currently, Dr. Shoda is leading an effort to represent the contribution of the adaptive immune response to drug-induced liver injury (DILI) in the DILIsym software model. The incorporation of what is known about T cell responses in the liver, including both drug- and non drug data, is expected to organize our current understanding within a unifying framework and to identify key uncertainties that can drive future experimental design to improve our understanding of T cell mediated liver injury.  Dr. Shoda also utilizes DILIsym in proprietary projects to help evaluate DILI risk for sponsor compounds in clinical development.

Prior to Simulations Plus, Dr. Shoda worked for over ten years at Entelos, Inc. modeling type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, and skin biology at Entelos, Inc. She has previous laboratory experience studying immune responses to parasitic pathogens. Dr. Shoda earned her Ph.D. in wildlife science and fisheries from Texas A&M University and received her bachelor of science in zoology from Duke University.