€34 million to develop liver disease test

A €34 million project which aims to lead to new diagnostic tests to assess patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and identify those most at risk of developing problems has been coordinated in Newcastle.

Liver Investigation: Testing Marker Utility in Steatohepatisis (LITMUS), funded by the European Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking, brings together clinicians and scientists from academic centres across Europe with companies from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). Their goal is to develop, validate and qualify better biomarkers for testing NAFLD.

The project is co-ordinated by Newcastle University, working closely with the lead EFPIA partner, Pfizer Ltd.

LITMUS will include 47 international research partners based at leading international universities and some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

Although many people have NAFLD, less than one in 10 will come to harm as a result.

The challenge is to identify those people that will be most severely affected and are gong to progress to liver cirrhosis or cancer so that appropriate care can be provided earlier.

At present this requires a liver biopsy, which can only be done in specialist hospitals, so there is need for better diagnostic tools.

Quentin Anstee, from Newcastle University’s Institute of Cellular Medicine and consultant herpatologist at Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, 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 highly-accurate 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.”

Chris Day, vice-chancellor and president, Newcastle University, said: “Tackling Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a major public health challenge and 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.”

Julia Brosnan, senior director of external collaborations and scientific alliances, Pfizer, said: “This is an exciting project and we look forward to working with the other LITMUS partners to develop new diagnostic tests for NAFLD, which is too often undiagnosed in patients. We hope the results of this project will help change that.”