Endonovo is really needed here! One of the next e
Post# of 416
(Total Views: 391)
Posted On: 07/10/2017 2:39:18 AM
Endonovo is really needed here!
One of the next epidemic-level chronic diseases doesn't have any approved treatments — and it could 'swamp the system'
Lydia Ramsey
Feb. 15, 2017, 1:11 PM
Liver transplant
A piece of healthy liver that was removed from a person rests in a bag before being transplanted. AP
Millions of people are living with a disease they've likely never heard of.
NASH, short for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, is a type of liver disease in which liver fat builds up in people.
NASH has become more common in recent years, and it's estimated to affect about 16 million Americans.
It's often called a "silent" disease because most people don't know they have it until it leads to problems like cirrhosis and liver failure.
"NASH is set to become one of the next epidemic-level chronic diseases we face as a society," Allergan CEO Brent Saunders said in a news release about the company's $1.65 billion acquisition in September of Tobira Therapeutics, a company with two NASH drugs in development.
NASH doesn't have many symptoms until its later stages, but it's set to surpass hepatitis as the biggest reason for liver transplants by 2020. In the meantime, the competition is heating up to see who can find a way to treat it.
The very brief history of NASH
NASH is a relatively new disease that appears to have a strong link to our lifestyles. But it's coming on quickly, as liver fibrosis — scarring in the organ — progresses in people with the disease.
It's very clear that the epidemic has moved from early to late stage.
"It's very clear that the epidemic has moved from early to late stage," Mani Subramanian, a senior vice president and liver disease therapeutic area head at Gilead Sciences, which has been researching treatments in NASH for the past six years, told Business Insider. "It's going to swamp the system."
The term NASH was coined in 1980, but research into it didn't ramp up right away, partly because the disease was regarded as a mild one. It's a disease inextricably linked with our eating habits, or at least exacerbated by them. Although you might not know someone officially diagnosed, people with obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and insulin resistance have an elevated risk of developing the disease.
"It's an unfortunate aspect of the Western diet," Paul Friedman, CEO of Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, another company developing a treatment for NASH, told Business Insider. "In a perfect world, people would be slim and not have insulin resistance. In the foreseeable future, there is a need — a lot of people can't lose that excess weight."
As NASH has become more prevalent, treatments for hepatitis C — the current leading cause of liver transplants — are making a dent in groups that might otherwise need liver transplants.
Now NASH is the "biggest untapped matter in medicine," according to Rohit Loomba, a professor of gastroenterology at the University of California at San Diego, who was also the lead study author on Gilead's phase two trial of a NASH drug.
Why it's so hard to diagnose
There are two key hurdles to treating NASH:
Finding it in patients, especially at early stages.
Finding a way to treat it.
Most people in early stages aren't symptomatic, and to know conclusively if a person has NASH requires a liver biopsy — which involves sticking a small needle into your liver and extracting a few cells. Even if they do have it, some might not want to know, since there's no way to treat it.
Steatohepatitis Liver Sample Wikimedia Commons
Researchers are working on imaging and blood tests that could either determine whether people need to take the next step and get a liver biopsy, but those can pick up only certain levels of fibrosis.
That means there's no simple blood test to track how the drugs are doing, as there is with cholesterol-lowering medications or diabetes meds.
That will present some challenges in creating a market for these drugs. According to estimates from the analyst firm Bernstein, that market could have $7 billion in sales by 2025.
The good news, Subramanian said, is that it's easy enough to diagnose people with stage 3 or 4 fibrosis. But at the same time, those people will likely be the most difficult to treat.
How drugmakers want to tackle NASH
Right now, the only way to treat NASH is through weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight and diet. But as is the case with heart conditions and metabolic conditions like diabetes, for many, that's not always feasible.
So researchers have come up with a few experimental ways to tackle it.
It has become a hot area for biotech investments, from smaller biotechs like Madrigal, Genfit and Intercept to major drugmakers like Novo Nordisk, Gilead, Novartis, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Allergan.
Because there are varying stages of the disease, people have different ideas about the best way and ideal time to treat it.
For example, do you treat it like other metabolic diseases — say, by lowering a person's cholesterol or getting their blood sugar in check? Or do you try to reduce the fibrosis or inflammation in the liver? And when's the best time to treat the disease given that the liver is good at regenerating?
It's possible that the answer is a combination of treatments with an alphabet of names. For example, the FXR agonists, which are some of the furthest along, go after lipids in the liver, breaking them down while keeping blood-sugar levels in check. Another approach is to block a target called apoptosis signal-regulating kinase 1, or ASK1, with the goal of reducing the liver fibrosis.
The furthest-along drugs have just made it through phase two studies, which means there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered in phase three trials — particularly how well these drugs work at treating the disease. Those results are expected to start coming out in 2019.
That puts us a few years away from any approved drugs. But in 2017, we might see some more data from some of these companies in earlier phases of clinical trials, which could give us clues about the best way to treat the disease.
One of the next epidemic-level chronic diseases doesn't have any approved treatments — and it could 'swamp the system'
Lydia Ramsey
Feb. 15, 2017, 1:11 PM
Liver transplant
A piece of healthy liver that was removed from a person rests in a bag before being transplanted. AP
Millions of people are living with a disease they've likely never heard of.
NASH, short for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, is a type of liver disease in which liver fat builds up in people.
NASH has become more common in recent years, and it's estimated to affect about 16 million Americans.
It's often called a "silent" disease because most people don't know they have it until it leads to problems like cirrhosis and liver failure.
"NASH is set to become one of the next epidemic-level chronic diseases we face as a society," Allergan CEO Brent Saunders said in a news release about the company's $1.65 billion acquisition in September of Tobira Therapeutics, a company with two NASH drugs in development.
NASH doesn't have many symptoms until its later stages, but it's set to surpass hepatitis as the biggest reason for liver transplants by 2020. In the meantime, the competition is heating up to see who can find a way to treat it.
The very brief history of NASH
NASH is a relatively new disease that appears to have a strong link to our lifestyles. But it's coming on quickly, as liver fibrosis — scarring in the organ — progresses in people with the disease.
It's very clear that the epidemic has moved from early to late stage.
"It's very clear that the epidemic has moved from early to late stage," Mani Subramanian, a senior vice president and liver disease therapeutic area head at Gilead Sciences, which has been researching treatments in NASH for the past six years, told Business Insider. "It's going to swamp the system."
The term NASH was coined in 1980, but research into it didn't ramp up right away, partly because the disease was regarded as a mild one. It's a disease inextricably linked with our eating habits, or at least exacerbated by them. Although you might not know someone officially diagnosed, people with obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and insulin resistance have an elevated risk of developing the disease.
"It's an unfortunate aspect of the Western diet," Paul Friedman, CEO of Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, another company developing a treatment for NASH, told Business Insider. "In a perfect world, people would be slim and not have insulin resistance. In the foreseeable future, there is a need — a lot of people can't lose that excess weight."
As NASH has become more prevalent, treatments for hepatitis C — the current leading cause of liver transplants — are making a dent in groups that might otherwise need liver transplants.
Now NASH is the "biggest untapped matter in medicine," according to Rohit Loomba, a professor of gastroenterology at the University of California at San Diego, who was also the lead study author on Gilead's phase two trial of a NASH drug.
Why it's so hard to diagnose
There are two key hurdles to treating NASH:
Finding it in patients, especially at early stages.
Finding a way to treat it.
Most people in early stages aren't symptomatic, and to know conclusively if a person has NASH requires a liver biopsy — which involves sticking a small needle into your liver and extracting a few cells. Even if they do have it, some might not want to know, since there's no way to treat it.
Steatohepatitis Liver Sample Wikimedia Commons
Researchers are working on imaging and blood tests that could either determine whether people need to take the next step and get a liver biopsy, but those can pick up only certain levels of fibrosis.
That means there's no simple blood test to track how the drugs are doing, as there is with cholesterol-lowering medications or diabetes meds.
That will present some challenges in creating a market for these drugs. According to estimates from the analyst firm Bernstein, that market could have $7 billion in sales by 2025.
The good news, Subramanian said, is that it's easy enough to diagnose people with stage 3 or 4 fibrosis. But at the same time, those people will likely be the most difficult to treat.
How drugmakers want to tackle NASH
Right now, the only way to treat NASH is through weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight and diet. But as is the case with heart conditions and metabolic conditions like diabetes, for many, that's not always feasible.
So researchers have come up with a few experimental ways to tackle it.
It has become a hot area for biotech investments, from smaller biotechs like Madrigal, Genfit and Intercept to major drugmakers like Novo Nordisk, Gilead, Novartis, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Allergan.
Because there are varying stages of the disease, people have different ideas about the best way and ideal time to treat it.
For example, do you treat it like other metabolic diseases — say, by lowering a person's cholesterol or getting their blood sugar in check? Or do you try to reduce the fibrosis or inflammation in the liver? And when's the best time to treat the disease given that the liver is good at regenerating?
It's possible that the answer is a combination of treatments with an alphabet of names. For example, the FXR agonists, which are some of the furthest along, go after lipids in the liver, breaking them down while keeping blood-sugar levels in check. Another approach is to block a target called apoptosis signal-regulating kinase 1, or ASK1, with the goal of reducing the liver fibrosis.
The furthest-along drugs have just made it through phase two studies, which means there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered in phase three trials — particularly how well these drugs work at treating the disease. Those results are expected to start coming out in 2019.
That puts us a few years away from any approved drugs. But in 2017, we might see some more data from some of these companies in earlier phases of clinical trials, which could give us clues about the best way to treat the disease.
(0)
(0)Endonovo Therapeutics, Inc. (ENDV) Stock Research Links
WORDS TO LIVE BY:
Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
Get .... PrivacyLok https://cyberidguard.com/
Try SafeVchat: https://cyberidguard.com/
My comments are only my opinion and are not to be used for investment advice.
Please conduct your own due diligence before choosing to buy or sell any stock.
Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
Get .... PrivacyLok https://cyberidguard.com/
Try SafeVchat: https://cyberidguard.com/
My comments are only my opinion and are not to be used for investment advice.
Please conduct your own due diligence before choosing to buy or sell any stock.
Scroll down for more posts ▼