Barcelona held the 2nd Innovations in NAFLD Care (INCBCN) Workshop on May 26-27th, a 2-day program aiming to explore different perspectives that healthcare professionals and patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) face daily. Organized by Prof. Lazarus and Prof. Schattenberg, this workshop provides a platform to bring together relevant global key opinion leaders, industry representatives, and patients to optimize NAFLD care and try to overcome some of the major challenges in this field, such as how to screen, diagnose, refer and treat patients in multidisciplinary teams that put patients at the center through comprehensive and equitable models of care.  

NAFLD is estimated to affect 33% of the world’s population. Given the association between this liver disease and obesity and type 2 diabetes, such dismal figures are expected to increase in the near future. 

Dr. Juan M Pericàs, consultant at the Liver Diseases Department of Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, investigator of the Liver Diseases Group at Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), and member of the CIBERehd advanced chronic liver diseases research group led by Dr. Joan Genescà, addressed the impact of socioeconomic status in fatty liver disease in his talk. Dr Pericàs underpinned the relevance of the social gradient of health in such a global public health problem such as NAFLD, raising the issue of the scarcity on studies on social determinants of health of NAFLD when compared to related disorders such as type 2 diabetes or obesity. Yet, available evidence suggests a large effect of socioeconomic status in both the distribution and outcomes of NAFLD across and within countries. 

Another hot topic was the state-of-the-art on drug development to fill an enormous unmet need, i.e., there are currently no approved drugs to treat NAFLD. This is the case even when dozens of clinical trials have been conducted during the last two years. Amongst other speakers, Dr Stephen Harrison provided a comprehensive overview of the current state of the drug pipeline. Elena Sena, also a member of Liver Diseases group at VHIR, discussed some of the main results of the European IMI2 EU-PEARL project in the field of NAFLD/NASH, particularly how setting up a platform trial on NASH might help move the field forward. In order to this, a clinical research network (CRN) involving investigators, research sites, patients and their communities, as well as clinical research organizations will be necessary. The foundations to build such CRN were laid during EU-PEARL, but need being strengthened in order to conduct a proof-of-platform trial before escalating to the European and global levels.

In brief, the second Innovations on NAFLD Care Workshop brought together some of the most relevant voices in the field in order to discuss the most pressing challenges that affect populations at risk of NAFLD/NASH as well as possible solutions, with a particular focus on setting up the research and policy agenda for international collaboration within the next few years.