The EASL CLIF Consortium held a telematic Steering Committee, where its members discussed last year’s progress and share their vision on the challenges of the coming year.

Cirrhosis has a huge impact in the quality of life of patients and the healthcare and economic systems. The EF Clif researchers have contributed to characterize and find the predictors and mechanisms involved in the development and clinical course of ACLF, which will help to prevent and treat ACLF in a near future.

The CARBALIVE Consortium has announced that the Phase 2 clinical trial has obtained positive data on efficacy of Carbalive™, a product candidate for the treatment of patients with decompensated cirrhosis.

The Consortium is developing and testing a novel blood filtration system, DIALIVE, whose design is based on 20 years of research led by Professor Rajiv Jalan, Professor Nathan Davies and members of the Liver Failure Group at UCL. Yaqrit Ltd was spun off from UCL in 2014 to develop and potentially commercialise treatments including Dialive™ for patients with advanced liver disease. Professor Jalan is the lead scientific founder of Yaqrit.

University Hospital Dubrava, led by Ivica Grgurevic; Charite University Hospital in Berlin, by Cornelius Engelmann; Laiko General Hospital of Athens, by George Papatheodoridis; Liver Unit. University of Verona, by Davide Sacerdoti; Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg, by Verónica Prado; Hospital de Santa Luzia in Viana do Castelo, by Rogerio Corga; Università della Svizzera Italiana, by Roberto di Donato and Sakarya University School of Medicine, by Aydin Seref Köksal are the new members.

We want you to know us and our partners better. We are proud of the research projects on going and the ones that are coming.

The trial is endorsed by the EF Clif and has engaged four hospitals in the area of Barcelona: Hospital Clinic, Hospital de Bellvitge, Hospital del Mar and Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol.

For the next 5.5 years, Prof Pierre-Emmanuel Rautou will coordinate 21 relevant European institutions to analyse and integrate data and biological samples from 2,000 patients, validate the results in animal models and test the most promising resultant therapy in a phase II clinical trial.

He also has vast expertise in leading collaborative international projects such as the EU H2020 ALIVER and CARBALIVE. Together with Prof. Vicente Arroyo, Director of the EF Clif, they will lead the Strategic Research Program of the Foundation.

In the premises of the Fondazione Cini, a small island in front of the world famous Piazza San Marco, the most active members of the Clif Consortium and other outstanding researchers from around the world attended the two-day Symposium entitled "The Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure syndrome in cirrhosis".

He has joined the EF Clif to conduct a research on the characteristics of different organ failures in patients with acutely decompensated cirrhosis, using the metabolomics data from the CANONIC Study cohort, under the auspices of the Grifols Chair during the next 6 months.

Dr Weiss is a member of the Anesthesiology and Critical Care Unit in Hôpital Beaujon in Clichy (France) and an Associate Professor in Liver and Digestive ICU at the same hospital. He has specialized in innate immune response and organ failure of patients with liver disease. He is also young editor of Intensive Care Medicine, the Journal of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine.

The signature of the first collaboration agreement between Grifols and the Fundació Clínic per la Recerca Biomédica (FCRB, participated by the Universitat de Barcelona and the Hospital Clínic) on June 11th, 2009, provided the grounds and funds to establish an initial consortium constituted by 70 University Hospitals from all across Europe.

Most of the EASL Clif Consortium centres were represented and active in the Congress. Thanks to the daily work of the Consortium members, the quality of their contributions in oral presentations, posters and a Think Tank on Chronic Liver Failure were highly appreciated and commented during the meeting.

During the several working sessions, more than 60 people including clinicians, molecular scientists, bioinformaticians, data managers and nurses, discussed about the different work-packages and milestones, in an attempt to perfectly coordinate the work of the 22 institutions which are part of the project.

The first inclusion week of the Aclara study finished with two new patients recruited in Hospital das Clinicas of Sao Paulo University.

24 professionals from Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Mexico and Peru attended the sessions On 30th and 31st of October 2018 where they were trained in the Management of samples, completion of the eCRF and use of the Clif-Consortium scores.

The first session served as an introduction to the management of the samples, followed by onother one focused on the protocol guidelines and the use of the Clif-Consortium scores

The discussion was focused on coordinating the efforts into reaching common act policies. Headed by the PIS of the Study, Dr Flair Carrilho, Dr Vicente Arroyo and Dr Richard Moreau and with the assistance of Dr Alberto Q Farias, the Study coordinator, the meeting was also instrumental to work further on different technical aspects and establish further guidelines of the ACLARA STUDY.

The last member to join the project has been Hospital de las Clínicas de Asunción (Paraguay) in December '18.

Dr Wenji Gu is a medical investigator, currently finishing her Master at the Department of Gastroenterology in Ren Ji Hospital, School of Medicine, and at Key Laboratory of Gastroenterology & Hepatology in Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The change is aimed to prepare the Foundation to major challenges coming in the near future, including a significant increase in the number of projects and funds, the participation of the Foundation in EU grants and the incorporation of high throughput omics technology in most observational studies and projects.

More than 80 investigators of the EASL Clif Consortium took part in the Assembly where the speakers gave a comprehensive overview of the latest researches in the setting of EF Clif and had the opportunity to exchange experiences.

Among the participants, there were most Steering Committee Members of the EASL-CLIF Consortium, a selected group of investigators from the PREDICT Study, the Principal Investigators of the 2018 research program of the EF Clif, members of the Grifols Chair, Dr Tom Henning Karlsen, EASL General Secretary, Professors Roger Williams and Flair Carrilho

The incorporation for both candidates is foreseen during the first quarter of 2018

The CANONIC study has shown that among patients with acute decompensation (AD) of cirrhosis, those who had Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure (ACLF, characterized by intense systemic inflammation, organ failures and poor outcome) were clearly distinct from those with traditional AD (who do not have organ failures and have good outcome).