About This Project

Your liver cleans your blood and plays an important part in digestion. In the USA, fatty liver disease affects one-third of adults and 17% of children and causes numerous health problems. We discovered a novel set of genes with fatty-liver-specific expression (patent pending).

Here, we will study disease-related changes in brain, heart, skin, adipose, lung, skeletal muscle, thyroid, adrenal gland, arteries, and blood from over forty people with fatty liver disease.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Fatty liver disease (hepatic steatosis) is associated with many cardiometabolic risk factors, such as type 2 diabetes mellitus, obesity, and dyslipidemia. Lipid accumulation in the liver is the first (reversible) stage of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and is a major challenge because of it prevalence, difficulties in diagnosis, complex pathogenesis, and lack of approved therapies. Thus, understanding the factors involved in the pathogenesis and pathophysiology of fatty liver disease will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the metabolic complications of obesity and may lead to the discovery of novel effective treatments.

What is the significance of this project?

According to the American Liver Foundation, "Liver disease is a leading cause of death in the United States, yet relatively little is known about these diseases compared to other chronic conditions."

Liver disease does not manifest with obvious symptoms or signs until a
relatively late stage. Thus, healthcare providers should continue to
improve their efforts to detect early signs of this disease. However, an
accurate estimate of the full extent of liver disease is not available,
primarily because of a lack of good diagnostic tests.

What are the goals of the project?

Using livers samples, we identified gene expression pattern that can act as a marker of fatty liver, a disease leading to serious and often fatal liver conditions, including NASH, cirrhosis, and cancer.

Here, we are excited about the possibility of developing noninvasive biomarkers for rapid and cheap diagnostics that can accurately detect early-stage of liver disease without biopsy.

We will also study gene expression patterns that are altered in organs other than the liver and share our results before formal publication in a scholarly journal.