The Guardian of the Liver

On 20 August 1952, in India, a boy named Shiv Kumar Sarin was born who would one day transform the understanding and treatment of liver disease across Asia and the world. He graduated MBBS with seven gold medals in 1974 and earned his MD in 1978 from Rajasthan University, then completed his DM in Gastroenterology at AIIMS in 1981. He joined G.B. Pant Hospital in 1983 and rose to full Professorship by 1991.

Driven by a vision that India needed a dedicated centre for the most complex organ in the body, he conceptualised and established the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS) in New Delhi under the Government of Delhi. Opened as a teaching hospital and later granted deemed-university status, ILBS became Asia’s first comprehensive liver “university” and a WHO Collaborating Centre for chronic liver diseases and viral hepatitis. Under his leadership as founding Director, Senior Professor of Hepatology, and later Chancellor, it grew into a global centre of excellence in clinical care, research, and training.

Dr. Sarin’s scientific contributions reshaped hepatology. He developed the universally accepted Sarin’s Classification of Gastric Varices, pioneered endoscopic band ligation for the primary prevention of variceal bleeding (a protocol published in the New England Journal of Medicine), and described two new disease entities—portal biliopathy and acute-on-chronic liver failure. He created innovative treatment protocols for cirrhosis, hepatitis B and C, and liver regeneration, including the use of growth factors as alternatives to transplantation. With more than 800 publications, 13 edited books, and leadership in major international guidelines, his work is cited worldwide.

He served as President of the Indian Society of Gastroenterology, the Indian National Association for the Study of the Liver, and the Asian Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver. As Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Medical Council of India he helped shape national medical education reforms, including the NEET and NEXT examinations. Honours include the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, the TWAS International Prize, the Om Prakash Bhasin Award, and the Padma Bhushan in 2007.

Today, as Senior Professor and Chancellor of ILBS, Prof. Shiv Kumar Sarin continues to treat patients, train the next generation, and push the boundaries of liver science. In the wards where failing livers are given new hope and in the laboratories where new therapies are born, his lifelong mission endures: that no one in India—or beyond—should suffer needlessly from diseases of the liver.