The Liver Meeting this year offers an indoor “park” that spans two floors, complete with a pickleball court. Katherine MacPhail/STAT

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Happy Sunday from Washington, D.C., where the Liver Meeting is well on its way. We’ll be here thru Tuesday and want to know: What are you finding fascinating? Tell us here: [email protected] or [email protected].

The elephant(s) in the room

All of science has been affected by cuts to federal research funding this year, but President Trump’s second term is looming over this gathering in other ways, too. On Saturday, Grace Li-Chun Su, the new president of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, and former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins addressed the monumental shifts.

Collins said he never would have guessed that scientific funding, long supported by both parties, would become a political target.

“Here in 2025 everything has become partisan, even this,” Collins said, referring to the gathering of scientists. “That is really a dangerous sign for the future of our society.”

He said most Americans aren’t aware of how decades of federally funded research have led to today’s lifesaving breakthroughs. To help reconnect people to that, he’s assembling a “storybook” with tales from patients whose lives have been transformed by medicine.

He urged researchers and clinicians to step forward as advocates for science, whether that be through outreach to high school science classes or through political advocacy like AASLD’s Capitol Hill Day. “The time for us to expect that to be somebody else’s problem has gone away.”

Su, who is also professor of gastroenterology at the University of Michigan, emphasized the importance of advocating for the future of hepatology.

“Convening in the U.S. capital is especially meaningful,” she said. “Right here is where the current and future state of public health is being debated and decided, and where the voices of our community have been and must continue to be heard — where policies influence how we practice liver care around the world.”

Collins and Su were also joined by a surprise guest — Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La), who spoke about expanding access to hepatitis C treatments, the threat to vaccines, and the ongoing government shutdown. You can read more about his comments here.

We also heard some attendees talking about travel interruptions and delays because of the government shutdown, which is affecting airports around the country. (The cavernous Walter E. Washington Convention Center could probably accommodate a giant sleepover if need be; the conference app has a robust map feature.)

In a ticketed session about how dietary and herbal supplements are causing liver injury, speaker Victor Navarro of Jefferson Health in Philadelphia said the shutdown had complicated his work. Along with Jay Hoofnagle of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Navarro collects reports of liver damage from mostly unregulated supplements, like high-dose turmeric pills. They typically flag their findings with the Food and Drug Administration. In recent weeks, that process has slowed because they’ve had trouble accessing the FDA’s data on such products, Navarro said.

Learning from fields of addiction and psychology

It’s been interesting to watch over the years as these conferences reflect the growing overlap between hepatology and addiction medicine. Both alcohol use disorder and obesity (which some consider food addiction) can lead to or develop alongside serious liver diseases. Clinicians are having to learn new skills to help their patients navigate all of the above. The new GLP-1 drugs offer some promise, because of their potential to do all that.

But clinicians are also looking to techniques more familiar to the shrink’s office, like motivational interviewing. Hepatology has become psychiatric practice, Henry Ford psychiatrist Gerald Scott Winder told a full room on Friday afternoon, “and it’s changed right under your feet.”

His tips: Ask open-ended questions, be encouraging, and if a patient starts crying, “Please do not start typing,” he said, eliciting a big (guilty?) laugh from the crowd.

Is hepatology using the right tools?

What doctors do with all of the photos they take of slideshows at these meetings? Some takeaways need no visual aid — like when they’re poking holes in the very paradigm of liver disease treatment.

Several such studies came up on Saturday during a presentation of key papers from the past year. Data out of Spain from researcher Edilmar Alvarado-Tapias suggest patients with cirrhosis who don’t respond to non-selective beta blockers could benefit from getting on a statin. Australian researchers found, in a small randomized controlled trial, that patients with decompensated cirrhosis who are already in the hospital or awaiting transplant could get stronger with supplemental feeding through a nasogastric tube at night. (The study found patients with an NG tube met 100% of their daily energy needs and had a 51 gram increase in protein intake per day.)

A third paper, from Andrew Lim of the Long Beach Veterans Administration, pulled a Gen Z and resurrected a relic from around Y2K: oral betaine. In three studies of the antioxidant — which is available cheap as a health supplement — MASH patients had a sizable reduction of the ALT liver enzyme when taking doses of up to 8 mg.

Rotterdam’s Laurens van Kleef scrutinized a bunch of noninvasive tests used to screen patients for liver disease. His team’s analysis found that in a sample of 11,000 patients, the popular Fib-4 test performed the worst against nine other tools. What did best? The MAF-5 test, which van Kleef developed for use in primary care settings. This finding raises questions not only about practice guidelines for liver screening, but about what tests should be used to identify patients for clinical trials.

One last earth-shifter: Artificial intelligence, which is on seemingly everyone’s lips here. Jin Ge of UCSF trained a chatbot to use the AASLD practice guidelines as its gold-standard reference so clinicians could ask specific questions related to liver disease. “LiVersa,” as the tool is called (a play on UCSF’s proprietary chatbot, Versa), did…not great when compared to popular tools, like ChatGPT. All responses were run by hepatologists for accuracy, safety and comprehensiveness. Ge, the lead author, said the tool is probably OK for low-complexity cases, but definitely needs work before it’s ready for primetime.

Some are ready to be livin’ la vida LiVersa. “This is going to happen whether we want it to or not, and this presents an incredible opportunity for national societies,” said UCSF hepatologist Jennifer Lai, who presented the paper.

Dinks, clinks and sponsored drinks

One fun feature of the conference this year is an indoor “park” that spans two floors. Beyond the posters in the exhibit hall is a pickleball court, golf simulator and giant chessboard. The pickleball court was empty around lunchtime Saturday, but things picked up around 2 p.m. Good for those who played.

Medical conferences are always chock-full of marketing from the sponsors, but the displays in the main conference hall were relatively mild. The most eye-catching ad is on the main escalators, about a new indication for Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy. The message seems to have landed. By early Friday afternoon, a stand at the base of the escalators that had contained papers with prescribing information was empty.

Livvy the Liver, mascot of the Liver Education Advocates, at the AASLD meeting in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 8, 2025. Katherine MacPhail / STAT Katherine MacPhail / STAT

Other companies, including Boehringer Ingelheim, Mium Pharmaceuticals and Gilead Sciences, are sponsored evening events, including a Pride reception Saturday night. (The only medical conference without alcohol, a researcher once told Isa, is the addiction medicine gathering. That seems to be true. Here there were lots of sugar-sweetened drinks around, too.)

And presenting Livvy, the detox diva

There was a bit of a commotion in the convention center’s main hall before 5 o’clock, as those passing through for the president’s address were waylaid by a celebrity sighting: Livvy the Liver. As the official mascot of the Liver Education Advocates, Livvy’s mission is to raise awareness for liver health and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Very much the woman of the hour, a line formed to take pictures with Livvy, and conference goers could choose a sign to hold up for their photo op. Options included: “DON’T BOOZE ME, CHOOSE ME!” “SUGAR’S MY KRYPTONITE!” and “LIVVY, THE DETOX DIVA.”

Livvy aside, there’s much more interesting science to come tomorrow and Monday. Keep an eye on your inbox. In the meantime, we’ll be trying to figure out how to stop the event lanyards from making that annoying clinking sound.

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About the Authors Reprints

Isabella Cueto

Chronic Disease Reporter

Isabella Cueto covers the leading causes of death and disability: chronic diseases. Her focus includes autoimmune conditions and diseases of the lungs, kidneys, liver (and more). She writes about intriguing research, the promises and pitfalls of treatment, and what can be done about the burden of disease. You can reach Isabella on Signal at isabellacueto.03.

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