A consortium made up by companies and research centres is working on the Liverbiobank project, seeking to identify non-invasive markers for the diagnosis and prognosis of chronic hepatic diseases, such as cirrhosis and fibrosis, as useful tools in clinical practice. The project is financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation with 2.4 million euros within the 2010 INNPACTO programme.

Liverbiomark, a 3-year project, involves the companies OWL Genomics, project coordinator, and MD Renal; the Centre for Cooperative Research in Biosciences, CIC bioGUNE, and the area of hepatic and digestive system diseases belonging to the Biomedical Research Centre CIBERehd. The three former institutions are headquartered at the Bizkaia Technology Park.

"The project focuses on identifying serum markers capable to detect and determine the severity degree and progression of such pathologies", explained Dr. Azucena Castro, General Manager of OWL Genomics.

As Dr. Juan Caballería, hepatologist at Hospital Clinic-CIBERehd, points out this study seeks to identify biomarkers in order to create a metabolic profile with two main goals: on the one hand, "to get diagnosis of the existence and intensity of fibrosis in chronic liver diseases caused by Hepatitis C" and, on the other hand, "to define the liver failure degree and the prognosis for patients with advances hepatic diseases of different aetiology".

Metabolomics is a very powerful technology in the identification of these biomarkers; its high sensitivity allows the analysis of over 1,000 metabolites in a very small sample. "The application of metabolomics in this project involves the assembly of two complementary methods; one based on mass spectrometry and the other on nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMRI), thus covering the largest range possible of metabolites", explained Dr. Juan M. Falcón, CIC bioGUNE researcher.