€34m to tackle liver diseases
UNIVERSITY LAUNCHES LITMUS PROJECT
A pioneering €34m project has been launched by Newcastle University to tackle a liver condition which can be caused by obesity.
The Liver Investigation: Testing Marker Utility in Steatohepatitis (LITMUS) will bring together clinicians and scientists from across Europe.
Their aim is to develop better ways for testing people who could be severely affected by non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) a condition caused by a build-up of fat in the liver.
NAFLD is usually seen in people who are overweight or obese and can lead to serious liver damage, including cirrhosis, if it gets worse.
Although many people have NAFLD, less than one in 10 people will actually be at risk of any harm.
Scientists said the challenge is to identify those people who will be most severely affected by the condition and go on to suffer liver cirrhosis or cancer.
Currently, this requires a liver biopsy, which can only be done in specialist hospitals, so there is a need for better diagnostic tools.
Professor Quentin Anstee, from Newcastle University’s Institute of Cellular Medicine and Consultant Hepatologist at Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, is working on the project.
He said: “Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is already the most common underlying cause of liver transplant in the USA and, with the obesity epidemic in Europe, we are very close behind.
“LITMUS will unite clinicians and academic experts from centres across Europe with scientists from the leading pharmaceutical companies, all working together to develop and validate new highlyaccurate blood tests and imaging techniques that can diagnose the severity of liver disease, predict how each patient’s disease will progress and monitor those changes, better or worse, as they occur.
“Lack of easy and accurate diagnostic tests means that many patients go undiagnosed until late in the disease process. It has also held-back efforts to develop new medical treatments for NAFLD.
“Availability of better diagnostic tests will help us to target care at an early stage of disease to the people who are going to be most severely affected. It will also help us to develop more effective medical treatments for NAFLD and to run the clinical trials that the regulatory agencies need so that they can licence these medicines to be prescribed by doctors.”
Professor Chris Day, vice-chancellor and president at Newcastle University, said tackling non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a major public health challenge.
“The award of such a large grant from the EU, allowing us to bring together pharma and academia in this way, gives us real hope of making significant advances in the diagnosis and treatment of this increasingly common and often devastating disease,” he added.
Newcastle University will work alongside the lead EFPIA partner, Pfizer Ltd, as well as 47 international research partners based at leading international universities and some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.