Empowered Patient Podcast Developing Drugs to Treat Rare Liver Diseases NASH PBC ACLF with Pascal Prigent GENFIT
Pascal Prigent, the CEO of GENFIT, a French biotech that has been working on liver diseases for about 20 years and has developed a compound called elafibranor for conditions such as primary biliary cholangitis (PBC). The company is also developing assets in acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). He highlights the high unmet medical need in ACLF, which currently has no approved treatment options and a high mortality rate. Prigent also discusses Genfit's partnership with Ipsen for the development and commercialization of elafibranor in PBC.
Pascal explains, "In reality, we don't have any approved option in ACLF, which is actually quite dramatic because you have a high mortality rate. To give you a little bit of context, people are suffering from chronic liver disease, regardless of the etiology. It can be too much alcohol consumption, it could be NASH, it could be viral hepatitis. Any kind of chronic liver disease will give us all the same journey, if you will."
"First, you have an injury to the liver. Then you have a progressive liver scar. You have the setup of fibrosis, that fibrosis becomes worse and worse. It becomes bridging fibrosis, but at some point, it will become cirrhosis. And that cirrhosis is first compensated, and then one day it can decompensate, and on that already failing organ, you have a precipitating factor."
"That precipitating factor could be an infection, binge-drinking, or drug-induced trauma. That stress on an already sick organ will get the liver to decompensate, and that decompensation of the liver will trigger additional organ decomposition, and that's what ACLF is. It's a syndrome at the very end of chronic liver diseases."
#GENFIT #LiverDisease #NASH #PBC #ACLF #LiverFailure #Hepatitis #ChronicLiverDisease #RareDisease