After defeating most infectious diseases, our societies moved into the age of chronic illnesses. With growing prevalences of obesity and diabetes, a new disease has silently emerged as one of the biggest threats to public health.
This disease is called Steatotic Liver Disease (SLD) – formerly referred to as fatty liver disease - and causes liver cirrhosis, which claims over one million lives annually. Yet, only few people have heard of SLD. SLD is a cruel disease because you do not have any specific symptoms until it’s already too late. This means that people carry this progressing liver disease for decades, unaware of its potentially fatal outcome.
Once the body has silently replaced all healthy liver tissue with scar tissue, life-threatening symptoms appear. These include fluid build-up in the belly, intense bleeding in the esophagus and brain injury. 3 out of 4 cirrhosis patients die within five years.
To make matters worse, SLD is not a rare disease by any stretch of the imagination. It is estimated that about 29% of the world’s population has some degree of SLD, and recent estimates for the US go as high as 57%. SLD is rarely caused by genetics, but rather a result of our modern life styles. The three main risk factors for developing this disease are type 2-diabetes, obesity and moderate-high alcohol consumption.
As of now, there are also no diagnostic tests designed for detecting chronic liver damage. Instead, GPs rely on old tests for hepatitis, which are only 53% accurate for detecting SLD. As a result, 75% of end-stage cases are diagnosed when it’s too late, and the disease is no longer reversible.
Spin-out of clinical research
Evido is was founded in 2021 and is a spin-out company from the Centre for Liver Research, at Odense University Hospital in Denmark. They have developed a new diagnostic platform called LiverPRO, that are capable of assessing the likelihood of having scar-tissue in your liver. LiverPRO is an algorithm-based software that uses routine blood samples, that is already available and easily accessible, to detect high-risk people of SLD. These are crucial design features because our healthcare systems are already overstretched and don’t have the capacity to implement new expensive technologies that force doctors to change their routines.
Instead, LiverPRO can be ordered with the simple click of a button in the GP’s own system, and provides an actionable recommendation on how to proceed with each given patient.
The objective of the Women TechEU project
The overall objective of the Women TechEU project is accelerate the deployment and adoption of LiverPRO to ensure better outcomes for undiagnosed people with advanced SLD. The project will be used to define a feasible route to market and help Evido make the initial steps. Support the expansion of their current data foundation and showcase the value of LiverPRO to support future roll-out.
