Sven Francque

Chairman, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, University Hospital Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

Prof. Dr. Sven Francque obtained his MD at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 1994 and was subsequently trained in internal medicine and in gastroenterology and hepatology at the Antwerp University Hospital, Belgium and at the Department of Hepatology of the Beaujon hospital, Clichy, France.

He has a long-standing interest and expertise in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and conducted basic research focusing on the vascular changes in steatosis and their contribution to disease progression and leading to his PhD in 2011. His research unit continues to study pathophysiological mechanisms of NASH. He is also conducting clinical research and his unit is partner in several research consortia supported by the European Commission and by the Innovative Medicines Initiative with a focus on NASH pathophysiology, biomarker research and hepatocellular carcinoma. His clinical trial unit participates from the early days of clinical trials in NASH in many clinical trials in the field.

Prof. Francque is a scientific committee member involved in the design of several phase 2 and current phase 3 trials in NAFLD and is national and international lead PI of several of these trials. He is author/co-author of over 180 papers in peer-reviewed journals and authored several book chapters on NAFLD. He is editor of JHep Reports, the open-access journal of the European Association for the Study of the Liver. He is senior clinical researcher for the Research Fund of the Flemish government. He is currently chairman of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology of the University Hospital Antwerp and senior full professor of medicine at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the University of Antwerp. He is scientific coordinator of the Belgian Week of Gastroenterology, the Belgian national research meeting of all scientific societies in gastroenterology and hepatology in Belgium. He coordinated the Belgian guidelines on NAFLD and more recently the EASL and EASO-endorsed NAFLD patient guideline.

Elisabetta Bugianesi

Scientific Director, Department of Medical Sciences, University of Torino, Torino, Italy

Dr Bugianesi MD, PhD, is currently Professor of Gastroenterology and Scientific Director of the Dept of Medical Sciences at the University of Turin in Italy. Dr Bugianesi received her MD and her Internal Medicine Residency at the University of Bologna. Her post-graduate training included a PhD fellowship at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, USA, from 1995 to 1998 where she became expert in the use of stable isotopes to study in vivo metabolism.

Dr Bugianesi is an international acknowledged expert on Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) with over 15-years’ experience.  She contributed to the field with work describing the metabolic mechanisms of insulin resistance related to the onset and progression of liver damage, the natural history of the disease (including the first demonstration of HCC as a complication of NASH), the development of non-invasive markers of fibrosis, and the involvement in several trials for the treatment of NAFLD/NASH. Her contribution to science is testified by over 200 publications, an H Index = 66, N. Citations = 20730 (Scopus).

She has been national PI of major EU funded research consortia: Fatty Liver: Inhibition of Progression (FLIP) (2010-2013), ‘EPoS’ Elucidating Pathways of Steatohepatitis (2015-2019) and ‘LITMUS’ Liver Investigation: Testing Marker Utility in Steatohepatitis (IMI2, 2017-2022). As clinician, she is a practicing Hepatologist based at the GI Division of the University Hospital “Città della Salute e della Scienza of Torino”, Italy.