Dr. Block formally retired from leadership at the Hepatitis B Foundation and its sister organizations, the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute and Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center, that he co-founded in 2022. He currently is President Emeritus and Professor at the organizations. He was recently visiting professor at Yale University School of Medicine and remains an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Dr. Block is co-inventor on 20 issued patents and 23 applications. He is scientific co-founder of several biotechnology companies, including Synergy Pharma (creator of Trulance™) Glycotest (developing fucosylated biomarkers to detect liver diseases) and Enantigen (merged with Oncore, now Arbutus) and is on several corporate boards.

Dr. Block trained as a Virologist and Biochemist. His research has been in therapeutic drug and biomarker of disease screening and discovery, in antiviral drugs and in biomarkers of liver cancer. He continues involvement in research by working with Dr. Yanming Du, Dr. Liudi Tang and Dr. Aejaz Sayeed.  He has co-authored more than 290 scholarly papers. Recently, he wrote the 2024 book “Curing Disease from the Ground Up” (Springer Nature) and was named a “Visionary in Hepatitis” by the World Hepatitis Alliance in 2017. He was elected Fellow (2017) to the U.S. National Academy of Inventors.

In 2020, Dr. Block and his wife, Joan, received the first Distinguished Public Service award from the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, from which he was also named a “Fellow” (FAASLD) in 2021.

He was awarded Med Doctor Honorary Causes (1999) and received his doctorate in microbiology at the State University of New York, completed a post-doctoral program in biochemistry at Princeton University and he has served on the faculties of Thomas Jefferson University and Drexel University College of Medicine, rising to tenured full professor at both institutions.