This past month, we traveled to the snowy peaks of Park City for Mash-Tag Annual Conference, a one-of-a-kind event where academics and industry leaders come together to tackle the biggest challenges in MASH and liver disease research.
We caught up with Christina Jayson, PathAI’s lead for products in MASH, IBD, and Immunology and Inflammation, who offered unique insights into the field’s direction. From the promise of combination therapies and precision medicine to the transformative potential of AI-powered pathology in clinical trials, Christina shared her perspective on the conference’s key themes and takeaways.
Here’s what she had to say:
By Christina Jayson, Ph.D.
MASH Tag is one of those unique opportunities where academics and industry can get together in a room and have conversations that push the envelope of where the field is, where it’s going and how we can all be a part of that. Discussion and discourse are encouraged, challenging each other is welcomed, and marrying and mashing (excuse the pun) of perspectives occurs in every session. It was also an opportunity to remember the great legacy of Dr. Stephen Harrison, a close collaborator of ours, who founded this conference and brought us into it years ago. As snow dusted the Park City mountain tops we dug deep with all the leaders, engaged in the conversations and here’s what we took away this year:
- Combination therapy is on the horizon and the need to bring precision medicine to MASH will be key. Tools and biomarkers to understand which patients will respond to which therapeutic, or therapeutics, and when to switch it up will be critical as more options come to market with different mechanisms of action. Companies like Novo Nordisk are at the forefront of testing this. Here is where histopathology research tools like Liver Explore™ shine, where we are able to directly interrogate patient biopsy samples at enrollment and map out what key histological features could predict response, and just as importantly non-response, and how these signatures can be linked to NITs leveraged in the clinic.
- AI Assist is key for histology assessment in clinical trials: There are too many pitfalls, too much subjectiveness to the scoring system, and too little reproducibility that the field is salivating for a solution. This is also one of the spaces where we see AI-powered digital pathology already incorporated into almost every trial in some form and drug makers eager to harness the insights that AI can uniquely bring. What is missing that will really shake the field is a regulated tool that can replace unaided pathologists as the primary endpoint for accelerated drug approval. PathAI has been getting ever closer to bringing that to the field with AIM-MASH AI Assist, and we’re hopeful 2025 is the year we can aid clinical trials and ultimately patients to the fullest.
- Beyond fibrosis stage 2 or 3 (F2-F3) MASH which now has one therapy on market for patients, therapeutic options for cirrhosis (stage 4 fibrosis) and ALD are a great area of focus where in both cases the disease is a spectrum. Understanding the nuances of the disease spectrum and figuring out how to treat patients at different stages are critical areas under investigation. AI DP may help unfold the spectrum and identify subclasses of patients that can aid in targeting and tracking the disease for response.
Our CEO, Dr. Andy Beck, rounded off the digital pathology session, following Dr. Quentin Anstee’s call to arms of the need for AI powered digital pathology in trials and praise for our landmark publications in Nature Medicine, reaffirming the impact AI-assisted pathologists can have at bringing reproducible endpoint assessment to primary endpoints in MASH trials for accelerated approval with AIM-MASH AI Assist. While our tool AIM-MASH solves the problems of today we are also looking to get in front of those of tomorrow with Liver Explore.
Learn more about AI-powered pathology to fuel MASH biomarker discovery and development by visiting our website.
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