March 25, 2022 The 5th DECISION Steering Committee meeting was held on 23–24 March 2022 in Paris, France The 5th DECISION Steering Committee meeting reunited our partners to review project progress

BARCELONA—The 5th DECISION Steering Committee meeting was a two-day event where work package leaders presented preliminary results after one year and half of dedicated work and extensive analysis.

Pierre-Emmanuel Rautou, Coordinator of DECISION and Professor at Inserm–Université Paris Diderot, France, welcomed participants in a brief opening session followed by David Gomez-Cabrero, Head of Translational Bioinformatics Unit at Navarrabiomed, Spain, who talked about patient stratification and shared his insights on systems medicine and omics data analysis. In the afternoon, member of the DECISION Impact Board Narsis Kiani (Karolinska Institutet, Sweden) together with Jonel Trebicka (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and Paolo Caraceni (University of Bologna, Italy) presented potential combinatorial treatment options for acute decompensation of cirrhosis. Next, Sabine Klein and Nico Kraus, postdoctoral and predoctoral researchers, respectively, at Goethe University Frankfurt presented promising results in rat models of decompensated cirrhosis. Members of the Steering Committee met at the end of the day to assess the results presented.

Day 2 started with Joan Clària, Research Associate at EF Clif and Professor at Clínic Foundation for Biomedical Research (FCRB), who presented the first results from 1.5 years of extensive characterization of samples from patients with decompensated cirrhosis using high-throughput omics technologies. Cristina Sánchez, Head of the Data Management Center at EF Clif, reviewed the infrastructure to support data management and explained how to request access to the DECISION data hub. Ameli Schwalber, Chief Executive Officer and Dissemination Manager at Concentris, Germany, provided an update on activities releated to commuications, dissemination, exploitation and training. Itziar de Lecuona, Deputy Director of the Bioethics and Law Observatory at University of Barcelona, Spain, provided an update on ethics approval and regulations. Next, Isabelle Durand-Zaleski, Professor at University of Paris XII, France, discussed about the impact of the DECISION project outcomes on health and socioeconomics at large. Rautou chaired a final session where major challenges were further discussed.

This study received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 847949.

About DECISION

Decompensated cirrhosis is an advanced form of cirrhosis of the liver associated with development of ascites, hepatic encephalopathy, gastrointestinal hemorrhage, and progression to acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). Despite multiple treatments, mortality in patients with decompensated cirrhosis remains high. The EU-funded DECISION project aims to understand the pathophysiology of decompensated cirrhosis leading to ACLF and to decrease patient mortality. This project will integrate results of high-throughput multiomic profiling with comprehensive clinical data from 2200 fully characterized patients with available standardized biological samples. DECISION will help to identify novel combinatorial therapies to prevent high mortality for patients with decompensated cirrhosis. Combinatorial therapies will be optimized in novel animal models and the best combinations will be tested in patients at high-risk of progressing to ACLF in a phase II clinical trial.

About EF Clif

The European Foundation for the Study of Chronic Liver Failure (EF Clif) is a private nonprofit organization which mission is to promote research and education in hepatic chronic failure with the aim to contribute to improving the quality of life and to increase the survival of patients with liver cirrhosis. Since its foundation in 2009, the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) Chair supports research activities through the EASL-Clif Consortium, a network of more than 100 European university hospitals and more than 170 clinical researchers. The Grifols Chair promotes translational studies across centers throughout Europe and North America within the framework of the European Network for Translational Research (ENTR) with 25 centers and more than 40 investigators.