S5 - E15.3 - From SLD Think-Tank 2024: Meeting Agenda And The "Magic Wand"

Surfing the MASH Tsunami

As the Surfers dive deeper into the substance of #SLDThinkTank 2024, Jeff Lazarus describes the meeting agenda and anticipated outputs, and other panelists discuss how the "Magic Wand" exercise and other ideation elements produced some truly "Big Picture" insights.
The conversation starts with Roger asking participants to describe the meeting agenda and what they considered its highlights. Before describing the agenda, Jeff enumerates the paper(s) that will result from this meeting. He lists the ten major issues the group developed for the pursuit of ending MASLD and MASH as a global health threat and proceeds to describe and elaborate on several of these.
When Jeff finishes, Jörn recalls that at the end of the first session, the chairs gave participants a "Magic Wand" to achieve the broader goal of making dramatic progress in patient screening and treatment. He notes a consensus that "we ha[ve] mechanisms and biomarkers" but have major social, political and academic challenges ahead if we are to slow the rate of the pandemic meaningfully. To Jörn, the field may need to improve tests and clarify cutoffs, but the major issues require support from governments and payers paying for tests rather than asking patients to pay for their own. Maja notes how long and challenging "the road between research finding and then implementation" is. Mike and Jeff go on to focus on prevention issues as separate from treatment.