New Project LIVERAIM
The kick-off meeting of a new project of which ELPA is part took place in Barcelona on March 21 and 22, 2024. Liver cirrhosis and liver cancer are common and responsible for high morbidity, impaired quality of life, and significant costs for healthcare systems, causing 300K deaths per year in Europe.
Predominant etiological factors are obesity, type 2 diabetes, and increased alcohol intake, which are all on the rise. It is predicted that healthy life expectancy will decrease in Europe over the next 30 years because of deaths due to liver disease. Liver cirrhosis develops after a very long period of asymptomatic liver fibrosis, staying undetected until patients develop severe complications due to cirrhosis or liver cancer. Currently, the only effective treatment available is liver transplantation, which is not applicable to all patients. If fibrosis is detected early to target the course of liver disease, then liver fibrosis is reversible. The LIVERAIM project concentrates a team of renowned clinical centres and Industrial partners, including SMEs, with great expertise in the field of liver disease, the aim being to design and validate a screening platform with biomarkers for population screening to use across Europe. The objective is to identify liver disease early and apply personalised therapeutic interventions. A large number of existing biomarkers will be tested for fibrosis prediction accuracy using biobank plasma samples from 40,000 subjects from previous H2020 EU-funded cohorts. LIVERAIM will develop a screening platform with biomarkers using AI for personalised early fibrosis diagnosis to be validated in a randomised controlled trial of 100K subjects from 6 representative EU countries. The platform will be linked to tailored, personalised therapeutic interventions to halt fibrosis progression. With LIVERAIM, early diagnosis and personalised intervention can stop liver disease progression and help decrease morbidity and mortality and the associated societal burdens.
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