Prof Jordi Gracia-Sancho, Barcelona, discusses the need to develop new therapeutic approaches that target more than one molecular pathway for chronic liver disease.

For me, one of the key take home messages of this 2019 Liver Meeting is that we now understand the need to develop therapeutic approaches that target more than one molecular pathway of the disease. Chronic liver disease is multifactorial – several components including inflammation, ballooning, steatosis, infiltration of  monocytes, extracellular matrix deposition, portal hypertension. All these contribute to the aggravation and the progression of chronic liver disease. 

For clinicians 

Therefore we need to develop new strategies and new therapeutic approaches targeting more than one molecular pathway. This is how it is going now and we see that there are phase 2 trials and phase 3 trials evaluating the combination or evaluating drugs that are multi-target for the treatment of chronic liver disease. Hopefully during the next year we will see the results of these trials and will validate how valuable these multi-target drugs are for the treatment of chronic liver disease.