6.10 - New Approaches to Patient Care: NIT-driven drug choices, Virtual Clinics, Large-Scale Screening

00:00 - Surf's Up 6.10.1
This conversation covers three topics. Jörn Schattenberg discusses two papers that suggest an exciting role NITs might play in future prescribing decisions, two executives from LiverRight describe the U.S.'s first virtual liver clinic, and Tom Jobson of Predictive Health Intelligence updates us on how simple analyses of large data bases can identify and motivate high-risk liver patients to visit their doctors. 

00:17:30 - Roundtable: NITs might help physicians determine the value of metabolic vs. specific anti-fibrotic effects for individual patients

The overall theme of this roundtable is "Major Stories and Events of the First Half, 2025." Jörn's contribution is to discuss two papers that use proteomic analyses to determine the degree to which a patient's MASH is driven by metabolic issues as compared to direct fibrotic challenges. Today, when we have only a few drugs, limited NITs and no proteomic tests available for use in practice, these findings point to directions for future research and test development. Over time, providers may be able to prescribe based on the knowledge of h0w much benefit metabolic agents might provide as compared to anti-fibrotics. This may point to step therapy or multi-agent first line therapy, but it is an exciting idea.

00:29:50 - Newsmakers: LiverRight opens America's first virtual liver clinic 

LIverRIght CEO Brandon Tudor and Chief Medical Officer Alexander Lalos join Roger Green to discuss the launch of America's first virtual hepatology clinic. Brandon shares his personal history to explain why providing fast access is so important to him. Alex describes his original motivation to go into Transplant Hepatology and how, over time, his focus has shifted from healing the sick to preventing disease in the first place. They describe how LiverRight works and their successes to date in reducing patients' time from first contact to visit, often from months to days. NOTE: Roger Green is a paid advisor to LiverRight.

00:56:44 - Expert: Tim Jobson describes how Hepatoscope is helping the NHS identify untreated high-risk liver patients and bring them to the office for screening. Tim describes hepatoSIGHT, a tool that "allows clinicians to get their hands on the data and to find patients both for treatment and for clinical trials."  He describes it as standard in Somerset, UK, now, and proceeds to share new data about the patient experience. This is a unique program in that providers reach out to tell individual patients they should visit the physician based on information found in their medical records. Interestingly, patient response is overwhelmingly positive. Six in ten respondents rated their satisfaction with the process, giving it a mean of 4.8 on a 5-point scale. Tim also shared some preliminary modeling suggesting that sustained use of hepatoSIGHT could increase clinical trial participation as much as 50-fold if trial sites had the capacity to take all these patients. In all, this is a warming, affirming look at whether and how patients know they benefit from what we ask them to do and share.   

01:29:58 - Conclusion

The business report discusses the next few episodes and asks who would like to meet Roger at Paris MASH.