Fighting fatty liver disease

Burgers, hotdogs, pizzas, chips, cakes, cookies, sweets, soft drinks – oh the temptations are many! But if you mix it with a sedentary lifestyle that creates a bad cocktail for your health. Obesity and type 2 diabetes are major risk factors for the development of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). NAFLD is excessive fat build-up in the liver cells, which are not built to be storing fat! NAFLD is estimated to affect up to one third of the adult population in industrialized countries and 70-80% of obese patients with diabetes. The milder stage of the disease, hepatic steatosis, is often asymptomatic and therefore undiagnosed. However, more than one third of these patients progress into the severe disease stage, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), characterized by hepatocyte degeneration, inflammation, and often fibrosis. NASH can further progress into cirrhosis and liver cancer which are life-threatening diseases. Sadly, there are no approved pharmacological treatments for NAFLD/NASH and drug development remain challenging because the molecular mechanisms underlying the disease remain poorly understood. In this project, we investigate function of a previously unknown protein called TRAIN. Preliminary data from our lab suggest that it operates as a major driver of inflammation and fibrogenesis in the liver and that TRAIN expression is elevated in NAFLD/NASH. Hopefully we can use this knowledge to form the basis for the future development of therapeutic targets that can help patients.