At the EASL Congress, thousands of clinicians and researchers from all over Europe meet to discuss current topics and research in the field of liver disease. At the congress in Vienna, members of the LiSyM-Cancer network were present and exchanged information about the latest basic research and developments in the clinics at the Postgraduate Course "From NAFLD to liver cancer", the Basic Science Seminar and poster presentations.
This year, the announcement of a new nomenclature for steatotic liver disease was particularly relevant. We will continue discussing this in the network!
Congratulations to Stefan Hoehme, LiSyM-Cancer project partner from University of Leipzig, who became Associate Member at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig.
ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, the Center for Scalable Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, is one of five national competence centers for Artificial Intelligence (AI) that are being funded under the federal government‘s AI strategy and established as permanent research facilities for AI, Data Science and Big Data.
Read more here.
Do you know what NASH is? The International NASH Day wants to raise public awareness on NASH and accompanying fatty liver diseases. We asked our LiSyM-Cancer coordinators for statements:
LiSyM-Cancer is a member of TMF e.V. - the Technology and Methods Platform for Networked Medical Research. At the annual congress in Cologne, the topics were genomic medicine, research infra structure and data use, patient participation, standardization and quality, and networking of research data infrastructures. TMF e.V. press release about the annual congress (in German)
At the annual status seminar of LiSyM-Cancer from 28th to 29th of March 2023, about 80 members from partner sites all over Germany met at the Center for Regenerative Therapies in Dresden (CRTD) to discuss their current research on liver diseases and the future of the systems medicine network. Dr. Nicola Scholz from the BMBF (German Ministry for Education and Research) attended the event and greeted the participants with pleasant words for the network. Also, representatives of “Forschungsträger Jülich” (PtJ) were present and listened to the progress and challenges of the LiSyM-Cancer partners.
In preceding workshops on mass spectrometry as well as cell isolation and spatial transcriptomics, the researchers discussed common standards and prerequisites for results of high quality. During the meeting, clinicians, experimentalists and modelers exchanged to bring the different approaches of research together. In interdisciplinary presentations of the three consortia SMART-NAFLD, C-TIP-HCC and DEEP-HCC, they showed their progress in multi-level characterization of early liver diseases and liver cancer. During poster sessions, coffee breaks and meetings determined for cross-network exchange, the scientists presented and discussed their interim results and received valuable feedback for their work. In break-out sessions specifically addressing clinical and modeling topics, the members exchanged on clinical procedures, MR Imaging as well as the different modeling approaches within the network.
Finally, the results from all sessions and consortia were brought together. Members of the scientific advisory board participating in person or online gave constructive and highly appreciated advice for improvements and future directions and highlighted the remarkable results as well as the extraordinary communication across multiple professional disciplines in the network. The meeting paved the way towards the interim evaluation and preparations for the next application phase which will focus on the clinical translation of the findings of LiSyM-Cancer.
The LiSyM-Cancer network is part of the "National Decade against Cancer" from the BMBF. Their press office has published articles on LiSyM-Cancer, SMART-NAFLD, C-TIP-HCC and DEEP-HCC for the lay public. The articles are in German. To the article
Around 40 young scientists from all three LiSyM-Cancer projects SMART-NAFLD, C-TIP-HCC and DEEP-HCC met for two days to get to know each other and their projects. There was vivid exchange on research and network on a personal level.
"Liver disease is often sensed too late" - An Interview by BMBF with LiSyM-Cancer Program Director Beat Müllhaupt
Read here (in German).