LAUSR

I am the Director of the Metabolic Liver Research Center and Professor of Medicine at the University Medical Center Mainz, Germany. I started to work on NASH in 2002 during my postdoctoral education at the Albert-Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY. Back then, I studied signaling pathways that contributed to liver injury and metabolic abnormalities in animal models. When I returned to Germany for my clinical training in Medicine, GI & Hepatology, I was confronted with an increasing number of patients with metabolic liver disease. Most of them were very worried about their condition but still fairly asymptomatic. The absence of adequate noninvasive diagnostics was a major obstacle in their management. Additionally, no standardized approach for treatment was available. This was when I realized this large unmet need and subsequently founded the Metabolic Liver Research Program at the University Medical Center in Mainz. Today we are offering modern diagnostics and innovative treatments to patients living with NASH; this ranges from supervised, web-based life-style interventions and nutritional counseling to novel drugs under investigation in clinical trials. Even after several years of intensive research in this field, many aspects of the disease are incompletely understood and the number of patients reaching precirrhotic or cirrhotic stages will increase over the next 10 years. Therefore, I see an urgent need to expand the existing efforts to study NASH.