Without improved diagnostics, the cost-effectiveness of intervention using existing and emerging pharmacological and surgical treatments in liver diseases will remain suboptimal. For these reasons, this hepatology biomarker VIB-GCP project is entirely driven by the following main diagnostic challenges:

1) Biomarker-based detection of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a type of inflammation of the liver, and the pathogenic processes of NASH in patients with steatosis, the accumulation of abnormal amounts of lipids in the liver, to guide treatment decisions and monitor the outcome of treatment.

2) Increasing the proportion of hepatocellular carcinomas that are detected at an early stage, to enable curative treatment in a higher proportion of patients.

3) Avoiding transplantation of livers that will lead to catastrophic primary non-function (PNF).

This VIB-GCP collaboration guarantees the further translation of established glycomics-based candidate biomarkers for the three diagnostic challenges into the clinic. These can go straight into validation studies and alphasite usage along current clinical practice to start yielding benefit for the hepatology patients in our university hospitals. On top of that, the core discovery technologies proposed are all ready to go to clinical validation or exploration after these years of prior technology development.