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The 5th Global NASH Congress will take place in London on May 26-27. Surfing the NASH Tsunami is serving as a Media Partner for the event. Professor Ian Rowe and scientist/entrepreneur Rachel Zayas join Jörn Schattenberg, Louise Campbell and Roger Green to review some key presentations and discuss what attendees are likely to learn from the Congress.

The preliminary agenda for the Congress highlights five significant areas of focus: recent updates in NASH pathogenesis; preclinical & translational strategy and new targets for treatment of NASH/fibrosis; non-invasive biomarkers and diagnostic tools; clinical development & clinical trial data and regulatory updates. 

The group examines conference presentations on these topics in the order presented here. Rachel Zayas kicks off the conversation by discussing her general excitement at hearing updates about gut microbiome and associations with disease. Rachel notes that  the microbiome is sometimes referred to as the "second human genome." She goes on to note that the microbiome might even have a greater impact than the genome, given that "for every one cell of human cells that we have in the body, there are 10 cells of genomes." Jörn Schattenberg notes that Madrigal has explored some of this information in the MAESTRO trials and hopes it may come up in this meeting.  Roger Green asks whether there might be a link between food insufficiency/scarcity and gut microbiome, given that so many subpopulations with PNPLA3 dysfunctions live with food insufficiency. 

As the conversation moves on, Jörn highlights the paper from Ayse Okesli Armlovich to raise the topic of using human precision-cut liver slices and 3-dimensional cell cultures to study drug combinations and improve the understanding of cellular interactions. This led to a conversation of the unique value of human ex vivo slides in evaluating how different medicines might work. 

The entire conversation went like this, interspersing comments about conference presentations with broader discussion placing this in the context of other episodes and clinical trends and papers.

Unfortunately, 5th Global NASH Congress will only be available in person in London May 26-27. Louise Campbell and Rachel Zayas will be attending the conference. They will share what they hear and learn with Roger Green and Jörn Schattenberg on a later episode.