LIVERAIM

Liver diseases kill some 300 000 people in Europe every year. Some of the biggest risk factors for liver disease are obesity, type 2 diabetes, and alcohol consumption, and as all of these are on the rise, cases of liver disease are likely to increase as well in the coming decades.

Many liver diseases are ‘silent’ in the early stages, and by the time people develop symptoms and seek medical help, their liver may be irreversibly damaged, meaning a liver transplant is the only effective treatment. If we could detect cases of liver disease early on, further damage could be prevented and in some cases, existing damage could even be reversed.

The LIVERAIM project’s overall goal is to set up a screening platform to detect cases of liver disease early on, so that patients can take steps to protect their liver before it’s too late. As the silent phase of the disease can last for two decades, there is a clear window of opportunity to take action here.

Previous research has found a number of biological markers of liver damage, but they have not yet been tested in large numbers of people in the general population. LIVERAIM will take biological samples and data from earlier projects (including the IMI project LITMUS) and use them to evaluate the ability of these biomarkers to detect which patients have liver damage and which do not. The results of this work will be analysed using standard statistics and artificial intelligence (AI) with the goal of developing a biomarker platform.

The platform will then be validated in a randomised clinical trial to prove the benefit of a screening programme. People diagnosed with liver disease will receive personalised advice designed to halt the progress of the disease. For the majority of patients whose liver disease is linked to factors such as obesity and alcohol use, the advice and support will focus on helping patients to change their lifestyle.

Ultimately, by helping patients to protect their livers, LIVERAIM will help to reduce the burden of liver disease on patients, their families, and health systems.