Digestive Diseases News
Spring 2006

‘Action Plan’ Outlines Coordinated Research Approach to Combatting Liver Disease

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has brought together several of its Institutes, Centers, and Offices to map out a comprehensive strategy to guide future research about liver disease.

The effort, detailed in a publication called the Action Plan for Liver Disease Research, seeks to boost the rate at which basic scientific discoveries are made and then transformed into clinical breakthroughs that benefit patients. The report called for closer coordination across the NIH and other federal agencies and set 214 research goals in more than a dozen categories.

“The major focus of this Action Plan is to stimulate translation of basic research findings into practical and effective means of prevention and control of liver diseases,” said Jay Hoofnagle, M.D., director of the Liver Disease Research Branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), which funds 39 percent of all the NIH liver disease research.

‘Explosion of Knowledge’

“The explosion of knowledge about fundamental biology and genetics in the past 20 years now promises to provide significant improvements in the management of liver disease,” Hoofnagle said.

Among the Institutes joining the NIDDK in the development of the plan are the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funds 18 percent of the NIH liver research, the National Cancer Institute, which pays for 16 percent of such work, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which funds 9 percent.

Funding for liver disease has been one of the fastest-growing areas of medical research-related support, tripling in the past decade and outstripping the increase in the overall NIH budget as additional resources have been brought to bear on diseases ranging from liver cancer to hepatitis to cirrhosis. Almost $400 million was spent on liver disease research in 2003.

Focus on Translational Research

In consultation with more than 250 experts, including researchers, physicians, and representatives of professional and patient advocacy groups, the NIDDK’s Liver Disease Research Branch and the Liver Disease Subcommittee of the Digestive Diseases Interagency Coordinating Committee developed the Action Plan with a special focus on translational research. Such research is a central element of the NIH’s strategic plan—the “NIH Roadmap for Medical Research in the 21st Century.” The Roadmap seeks to efficiently bridge the gap between basic research and therapies—diagnostics—for patients.

The Action Plan highlights several other principles designed to guide liver research. “These principles are axiomatic,” the report states, “but have been found to be reliable in guiding initiatives in biomedical research.” In addition to the push for translational research, the guiding principles include a commitment to basic research, an effort to ensure that new findings at the clinical level help to inform more fundamental research, and an emphasis on fully utilizing important breakthroughs in other fields such as the Human Genome Project.

The document also announces plans to tackle several specific projects as representative “benchmarks” for assessing the overall success of the Action Plan, calling for ways to improve the success rate of hepatitis C therapy, to find better ways of measuring liver fibrosis, and to improve liver cancer screening.

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NIH Publication No. 06–4552
May 2006