Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease could affect millions of people and become a market of choice for the industry.
The four-letter acronym is not yet known to everyone, and yet NASH could become a real health scourge in the years to come. The pathology, also called “fatty liver disease”, already affects hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and it should not improve. A threat that could also be a boon for the pharmaceutical industry, reveals a report by Agence France-Presse, cited byExpress.
France pushed a phew! of relief this week, when published in the New England Journal of Medicine of a study on the global obesity epidemic. France, unlike many other countries, has managed to stabilize the proportion of inhabitants affected by obesity. But another study, from Public Health France this time, had the effect of a cold shower the next day: it is still one in two French people who is overweight or obese today!
Half of obese young people concerned
So many people who could well be overtaken by NASH, sooner or later. Because “non-alcoholic fatty liver disease” is above all due to excess weight. “At present, and for several years, this condition represents more than a third of my consultations and this continues to increase with overweight. NASH is our daily life. It affects everyone, all patient profiles and does not spare children ”, recently detailed Professor Victor de Lédinghen, head of the hepato-gastroenterology department at the Bordeaux University Hospital, in our columns.
In Western countries, 3 to 11% of children are indeed affected by NASH. Among young obese or overweight patients, 46% have symptoms. “The incidence of pediatric metabolic steatosis continues to rise alongside the childhood obesity epidemic,” confirmed us Professor Lawrence Serfaty, hepatologist at Saint-Antoine Hospital (Paris).
$15,000 per year
The downside of this worrying epidemic: all these patients represent a flourishing market for laboratories already positioned in hepatology or who have started there. The first operations around NASH would have started in 2015, reveals AFP. In 2016, the American Allergan bought Tobira, a Californian biotech, for 1.7 billion dollars. The laboratory has also joined forces with the Swiss Novartis to carry out joint research and tests. Giles, Intercept, and the French Genfit are also in the race.
Eventually, the prices of NASH treatments could reach 13 to 15,000 dollars per patient per year in the United States and half as much in Europe, Jean-François Mouney, CEO of Genfit, told AFP.
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