Regional Coordinators for North America Ruben Hernaez (Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center, TX, USA) and Constantine Karvellas (University of Alberta, Canada) co-chaired the event.

Rajiv Jalan, Scientific Coordinator of the CHANCE study at Royal Free Hospital – University College London, UK, welcomed attendees and briefly reviewed the rationale behind the CHANCE study. He highlighted the work by former Regional Coordinator for North America Vinay Sundaram (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, CA, USA), who sadly passed away last year, for contributing to define the main questions that CHANCE aims to answer. Next, Jalan presented results from the interim analysis carried out by statisticians at the EF CLIF Data Management Center and explained why patient recruitment to current protocol could stop after having enrolled more than 1000 patients in the study.

William Bernal, Co-Principal Investigator at King’s College London, UK, shared his insights about the future of the CHANCE study and challenges that need to be overcome for the success of the project. He pointed out that recruitment of patients with severe acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF) (i.e., patients included in group 1) will continue to be able to define liver transplant futulity criteria and develop a new prognostic model for transplant candidate selection.

Cristina Sánchez-Garrido, Head of the Data Management Center at EF CLIF, Spain, stressed that data quality and completeness is essential to address both primary and secondary objectives, and described the route to achieving them through changes in the electronic case report form that will be available during phase 2 of the study.

Jalan presented a plan for publications, reviewed authorship based on previous agreements and provided an outline of the process to apply for ancillary studies. He introduced the LEOPARD project – Liver electronic offering platform with artificial intelligence-based devices – coordinated by Assistance Publique–Hôpitaux de Paris (AP–HP) as an example of successful ancillary study that has recently received funding from the European Union within the framework of the Horizon Europe research and innovation program.

Co-chairs of the meeting moderated a final Q&A session and closed the meeting.

The CHANCE study is promoted by European Foundation for the Study of Chronic Liver Failure.