Lars Johansson, CSO at Antaros Medical, presented at the Liver Forum 20 Meeting last Friday, March 6. The Liver Forum is an international, multi-stakeholder initiative led by the Forum for Collaborative Research bringing together academia, industry and regulators to facilitate drug development for the treatment of liver disease.
Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) and its more progressive form, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) are highly prevalent and often undiagnosed, with fibrosis being the main predictor of poor outcomes. Current methods to assess fibrosis are either invasive or not sensitive enough to detect early fibrosis. There is a high need to develop non-invasive methods to detect, stage and elucidate the molecular processes that drive the pathology of fibrosis and enable assessment of treatment effects in the search for novel antifibrotic drugs.
Lars’ presentation focused on providing an update on the development of ATH001, a positron emission tomography (PET) tracer that is being developed to probe the presence of platelet-derived growth factor receptor beta (PDGFRβ), a marker of ongoing fibrogenesis in tissue. ATH001 enables tissue-specific quantification of active fibrotic disease. The update included a discussion about the first in-man data in healthy participants and those with varying degrees of MASH-fibrosis.
Learn more about the event here: The Liver Forum