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EASL Monothematic Conference: Signaling in the Liver

http://www2.kenes.com/amsterdam2010/Pages/Home.asp​x

Summary: Hormones, cytokines, metabolites, soluble and mechanical factors are able to stimulate signalling pathways and illicit responses in and outside the liver. In this conference the focus is on signalling and signal transduction in the liver. The liver is a particularly interesting organ to study these pathways since it has a great number of very different ways to react to stimuli: the liver can regenerate, become inflamed, fibrotic, cholestatic, malignant and it can functionally fail. 

The liver is located at the cross roads of the splanchnic and systemic circulation where it has to react and to survive a myriad of stimuli that it receives from the intestine. This includes nutrients, metabolites, drugs and bacterial products, viruses, endotoxines and cytokines. Defects in metabolic signalling in the liver can affect the whole organism as well as the liver itself leading to hepatic encephalopathy, hepatorenal syndrome, steatosis, steatohepatitis, liver failure and probably also to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus. The liver plays a hitherto underestimated role in cardiovascular disease as it is a central organ for cholesterol and lipid metabolism. As a bile producing organ, the liver has to deal with high concentrations of toxic bile acids and yet bile acids also have a signalling role in the liver where they affect many metabolic pathways. In hepatology, there is an urgent need for drugs that can stimulate regeneration, stop inflammation and fibrosis, stop apoptosis and stop tumor growth and vascularization of malignant tumors. Also new developments in the cardiovascular field and the field of diabetes mellitus depend to a large extent on better insights in the function of signalling pathways in the liver.

During this EASL Monothematic Conference, the focus will be on receptors and signal transduction pathways in the liver with as aim to cross fertilize areas that have been developing over recent years. The organizers hope that bringing together researchers from related fields will lead to new insights, new ideas and perhaps new drugs and biologicals for the treatment of liver disease.