Surfing the NASH Tsunami covered the 5th Global NASH Congress. Louise Campbell and Rachel Zayas conducted speaker interviews with executives from Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, Altimmune, Antaros Medical and Julius Clinical, and the Surfers shared reflections on meeting topics and other key Fatty Liver-related issues.

This episode blends conversations between the Surfers and “Surfer-for-a-day” and Aged Diagnostics CEO Rachel Zayas with interviews with four of the 5th Global NASH Congress attendees: Madrigal Pharmaceuticals Founder, Chief Medical Officer and President of R&D Rebecca Taub, Altimmune Chief Medical Officer Scott Harris, Julius Clinical Chief Scientific Officer Diederick Grobbe and Antaros Medical Vice President of Global Business Development Caleb Roberts. The interviews covered a range of topics, including: (i) the need to identify Fatty Liver patients at the primary care level; (ii) the critical role patient advocates can and must play in the product development and treatment pathway processes; (iii) the relevance of advanced imaging to understanding the multiple effects of Fatty Liver Disease and drugs that treat it on renal, cardiovascular and other non-hepatic systems in the body; (iv) the importance of liver volume independent of liver fat levels in evaluating patients and therapies; and (v) prospects that future bariatric medicines might deliver long-term weight loss at levels comparable to what we expect from bariatric surgery. The Surfers’ conversations covered these topics as well, along with a review of the two keynote presentations. In one keynote, Sven Franque expanded on a topic he covered at the #INCBCN conference in Barcelona: the ability of small amounts of liver fat to cause structural changes in the liver (removing fat will reverse these). In the other, William Alawazi discussed some clinical trial design artifacts that might obfuscate or even confound trial results.