S5 E14.2 - Remembering Stephen Harrison: Professional Accomplishments

Surfing the MASH Tsunami

Manal Abdelmalek and Naim Alkhouri join co-hosts Jörn Schattenberg, Louise Campbell and Roger Green to reflect on the greatest professional accomplishments of co-founder and former co-host Dr. Stephen Harrison.
Naim Alkhouri starts this conversation by describing the two prospective epidemiology papers Stephen co-authored at San Antonio Military Medical Center in 2011 and 2021, an innovative design that provided early estimates of the breadth of MASLD and MASH in an asymptomatic population. He goes on to discuss Stephen's work on FAST and other NITs and finishes by remembering Stephen's exceptional work in drug development, culminating in the recent FDA approval of Rezdiffra.

Manal Abdelmalek starts her comments by recalling that Stephen developed the BARD score and, years later, celebrated that it had been supplanted by better tests. After commenting on his impact in drug development, she describes him as "visionary" and says Stephen was "not a one man show. He thought about networks and collaborations and how to move a field forward with speed and agility."

Louise Campbell also reflects back on the BARD score and the process by which Stephen came to accept that the nomenclature change was a necessary thing. She closes her comments by reflecting on his persistence and innovation in drug development and finishes with a Harrisonisms about the value of failure and learning in the development of the product WD-40.

Finally, Roger Green discusses how Stephen's desire to tear apart his failures and learn from them resulted in the landmark paper that challenged how biopsies were being read and interpreted in clinical trial design, and also agrees with an earlier comment from Manal about how innovative the original design for Pinnacle Clinical Research was.