Hepatotoxicity Meeting a Tremendous Success 

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By Ann Haran, AASLD Staff

The recent hepatotoxicity conference “Drug-Induced Liver Injury: Getting the Medicine and Science Together” proved to be a rousing success. Co-sponsored by AASLD, the FDA, and PhRMA, this workshop brought together nationally and internationally known experts in the field of hepatotoxicity to share recent clinical and basic findings in the field of drug-induced liver injury (DILI).

With approximately 200 attendees present, the meeting was considered to be a remarkable achievement by both course organizer Dr. John Senior and AASLD Hepatotoxicity Special Interest Group (SIG) Chair Dr. Paul Watkins. As Dr. Senior points out, “the goal of the course was to get basic scientists and clinicians together, and there was a near perfect balance between the academia sector, the industry sector, and the government sector.” Dr. Watkins mentions how the meeting “has created an international community of people interested in this topic.” The intent was to get people together, and they did.

A transcript of the entire course, which was taken by an experienced court reporter, is now available on the AASLD website so that virtually anyone can still attend. The online course also includes the PowerPoint slides shown by each speaker along with the remarks made about them, and will be a great benefit to a wide array of users, including clinicians, academic scientists, and industry personnel involved in developing new drugs. Dr. Watkins recommends that anyone “from those with interest in anything from the most basic aspects of DILI, such as genetics, to those in clinical practice and involved in clinical trials” review the online materials. Dr. Senior mentions that the web transcripts will be copied to an FDA website and docket to include a place for user comments.  

This annual course is expected to continuously evolve in coming years, as more genetic factors that determine susceptibility to DILI are discovered along with other types of factors. In coming years, Dr. Watkins expects to see an increase in the number of genetic markers that help predict who will develop liver injury, which will help to make drugs safer and allow us to determine what drugs need to be taken off the market altogether. According to Dr. Senior, “industry spends money on new drugs, but they may have to be taken off the market if just one or two people get sick from them. We need to determine why an individual person is negatively affected by a certain drug. It can be extremely costly to industry if a drug has to be taken off the market because one patient has a bad reaction to it."

AASLD recently created the Hepatotoxicity SIG, and members of this SIG will brainstorm ideas for the next conference in this topic. Any AASLD member may join the SIG and become involved. As Dr. Senior points out, “the addition of AASLD as an intermediary in this important subject has been enormously helpful.”