Manal Abdelmalek, Jörn Schattenberg and Ian Rowe join regulars Stephen Harrison, Louise Campbell and Roger Green to recap NAFLD and NASH-related insights from the 2021 , the AASLD annual liver meeting. This conversation focuses on complexities and challenges NAFLD drug development and patient treatment will face in the future and ends with predictions about the biggest stories of the 2022 Liver Meeting (hopefully hybrid instead of only digital!).

The specific complications include microbiome, which has the potential to add a regional (or even individual) component to our understanding of NAFLD. Stephen Harrison speculates on how the scarcity of MRE machines will affect patient diagnosis if MRE becomes the dominant method for diagnosing/staging NASH and Roger Green notes that the advances in disease analytics and modeling have all resulted from continuing improvements in the quality and cost effectiveness of generating and analyzing data. Finally, panelists state when they expect to be the big story of the 2022 TLM, with the group divided evenly between those looking to Phase 3 results from ongoing trials and those who believe that the increasing presence of the patient viewpoint will drive significant changes in every element of how we diagnose, stage and treat patients in the future.