Meet Our Executive Director
Dr. Karla Thornton
Born in Lubbock, Texas, Dr. Thornton didn’t always have medicine in her sights. While earning her undergraduate degree in the 1980’s, she saw several of her friends contract HIV, a recently-discovered and very deadly virus at the time.
A Dream to Care for Others
“My friends got very, very sick. That really made me want to go to medical school and become an HIV provider – it was my inspiration,” says Dr. Thornton. Filled with purpose, she took extra time to go back and complete her pre-medical school requirements.
Dr. Thornton decided on the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School where she completed two years of studies and then took a break to earn her Master of Public Health in epidemiology at the University of Michigan. She completed her clinical rotations in Texas and decided on The University of New Mexico for her internal medicine residency and a fellowship in infectious diseases. Dr. Thornton has served the people of New Mexico ever since.
When Dr. Thornton became the medical director of UNM’s HIV clinic, she saw that many of her patients were also co-infected with hepatitis C – and gastroenterologists were refusing to treat co-infected patients.
“These were the days of the miserable interferon* treatments, and I couldn’t find a provider to treat my patients. There was nobody doing it in New Mexico, so I reached out to a gastroenterologist in New York City and asked him if I could come learn from him,” says Dr. Thornton. After learning his treatment protocols, she returned to New Mexico and began treating her own patients. Soon, word got around, and other providers started sending her their co-infected patients.
In 2003, Dr. Sanjeev Arora was just starting his first ECHO program for hepatitis C. He asked Dr. Thornton to join the ECHO Hub team to share her unique expertise. Twenty years later, the original hepatitis C ECHO program still takes place weekly.
Dr. Thornton’s interest in hepatitis C began to blossom. In 2004, she partnered with the New Mexico Corrections Department to screen and treat HCV in the prisons. Seeing the opportunity to address the problem “upstream” by educating incarcerated people about risky behaviors, Dr. Thornton launched the New Mexico Peer Education Project in 2009, modeled after an HIV peer program in Texas prisons.
“We knew how hepatitis C was transmitted, but people didn’t know how to protect themselves, so we started the peer education program. This is one of the most gratifying things I’ve ever done.”
Based off of its success, Dr. Thornton and team created a follow-on program, called the Community Peer Education Project, to support people on parole complete the conditions of their release and reintegrate into society. Today, Indiana, Canada, and the Dominican Republic have implemented PEP at their facilities.
In addition to her ECHO programs, Dr. Thornton has contributed to the global community by serving as co-chair of the World Health Organization’s Guidelines Development Group for the treatment of HCV (2017-2022); co-authored the Hepatitis B Management: Guidance for the Primary Care Provider, published by the University of Washington; and serving as a key opinion leader for the International Network on Health and Hepatitis in Substance Users Work Group on Developing Global Consensus Guidelines for Hepatitis Service Delivery in Prisons, among other activities.
Today, Dr. Thornton lives in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she and her husband enjoy growing their own food, listening to live music, and spending time with their three adult children.
*Interferon is not a direct-treatment drug for hepatitis C; it bolsters the immune system and is no longer used for hepatitis C. When taking interferon drugs, patients had to take it for one year and often described feeling like they had the flu. It had a cure rate of about 50%.