What is IFADO’s main focus?
Our passion is liver physiology, hepatotoxicity and functional imaging.
How has participating in TransQST impacted your company?
We had the chance to find partners with common interests and complementary technologies; this allowed us to establish exciting collaborations.
What challenges has IFADO faced across the project? What are your main achievements in TransQST?
Together with our partners in TransQST we discovered a so far unrecognized mechanism how chemicals can cause liver damage, which we named “futile bile acid cycling”. Having understood this mechanism a therapy was developed that massively ameliorated hepatotoxicity. The results were published in the Journal of Hepatoloy.
What do you believe is the main contribution of TransQST in the field?
TransQST found a clever strategy to integrate mathematical modeling into experimental research. This led to several important progresses. I appreciate TransQST because of its realistic and undogmatic approach which allowed researchers to rapidly adapt to surprising realities revealed by unexpected experimental data.