Alcoholic Liver Cirrhosis - Potential Treatments(Trials in Progress)?

[idyllic420]

Are there any promising early stage trials that may be approved in next 1-2 years to treat cirrhosis?

[Str8jacket]

Short answer-no. There are some things in the works to treat complications of cirrhosis, like HE. Carbalive, fecal transplants, and a new amino acid formulation look promising. Traditionally, research into treating ESLD has been minimal and underfunded. Do you know of any liver patient advocacy groups raising hundreds of millions of $£€ for liver research breakthroughs? Me neither.

A prof at Edinburgh is looking at whether macrophages can clear liver scar tissue in a phase II trial. The phase I showed a good safety profile, but no noticable fibrosis regression I believe. Even if the trial is widely successful, this therapy will not be available in a year or two. There are a few other long shot tests of various stem cell therapies, but none have shown promise yet and it's unlikely any will anytime soon. Stem cells just don't like to colonize scarred up cirrhotic tissue with terrible blood flow.

Check clinicaltrials.gov for more info.

Don't bother looking at research reporting cures for cirrhosis in rats. Those have not yet had any translation to humans in 20+ years, and rat models (damage over ~8-12 weeks) do not reflect human cirrhosis (damage over years or decades) well.

[Hidden]

Hi idyllic420, I'll post a link to The Foundation for Liver Research which may be useful to you.

liver-research.org.uk/

Trust10

[Str8jacket]

To add a couple of thoughts, while there seems to be nothing on the 1-2 year horizon, there is some interesting research out there. A team out of the Univ. of Pittsburgh (LyGenesis) is starting phase II trials to try creating mini-livers in human lymph nodes in patients with advanced cirrhosis. A previous experiment in pigs seemed to create functional liver tissue in lymph nodes, fascinating stuff.

Another lab in San Fransisco is trying to use viruses to reprogram scarr tissue cells to act like liver cells. Still many years away from even possible clinical trials, but again, cool stuff.

And (breaking my own ignore-rodent research rule of thumb) a group in China reprogrammed mice spleens into possibly functional second livers. This approach is much further removed from clinical trials thannthe above, but again, quite cool.

There are teams across the world using out-of-the-box thinking to try to address end stage liver disease. What's lacking is a major global source of funding to drive innovative approaches like these across the finish line and encourage many others. Pharmaceutical companies tend to move slowly and are more focused on easier and more lucrative targets, like treating liver disease (mainly NAFLD/NASH) before it gets to cirrhosis, wouldn't put much hope in their work.

If you can help it, avoid ESLD for at least a decade or two. Or better yet, never go there.