Success Stories
Enabling the Fight Against Asian Liver Fat
Scientists have gained key insights into how non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) affects Asians and possible treatment options, thanks to a successful collaboration between Novo Nordisk and its partners in Singapore.
NAFLD is the excessive accumulation of fat in the liver of patients who consume little to no alcohol. If left untreated, NAFLD could lead to serious liver damage, including cirrhosis (scarring in the liver) or even cancer. NAFLD is prevalent in the region, affecting around 42% of people in Southeast Asia1.
To address the growing public health concern of NAFLD in the Asian population, the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s (A*STAR) Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) collaborated with Novo Nordisk to set up the EMULSION-Novo Nordisk Asian Biomarker Laboratory (ENABL).
The Ensemble of Multi-disciplinary Systems and Integrated Omics for NAFLD (EMULSION) is a fatty liver research programme co-led by the NUS and A*STAR, funded by A*STAR’s Industry Alignment Fund – Pre-positioning Programme.
“We started EMULSION with the aim to define the natural history and disease trajectories of NAFLD in Asians through longitudinal cohort studies, and employ multi-omics approaches to uncover novel disease pathways and subtypes in Asian patients.” says Prof Ng Huck Hui, Lead Principal Investigator of EMULSION.
“By combining clinical expertise from NUS and A*STAR with Novo Nordisk's drug development capabilities, we sought to advance the scientific understanding and therapeutic management of NAFLD in Asia on an unprecedented scale.” explains Assoc Prof Dan Yock Young, Joint Principal Investigator of EMULSION.
Since the establishment of ENABL in 2020, the team has gathered comprehensive clinical, imaging, and multi-omics datasets from more than 400 patients in Singapore. ENABL has also built significant expertise in areas such as human sample taking, DNA library generation and specific circulating biomarker assays.
“This partnership has provided critical human biomarker data to more than 5 five of Novo Nordisk’s projects,” says Dr Karin Conde-Knape, Senior Vice President of Global Drug Discovery at Novo Nordisk.
“It has also led to the development of a very elaborate pipeline for expression profiling analysis of Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) and other patient cohorts, which could potentially be used as a template for similar studies in the future to delineate disease development,” she adds.
Dr Conde-Knape raises the idea of extending the programme to track the collected cohort longitudinally. She points out, “The extensive phenotyping already achieved by the ENABL study presents several potential paths for exploration, making an extension of the programme appealing.”
The collaborative model with Novo Nordisk has cultivated trust between partners and serves as a prototype for subsequent partnerships within Singapore’s research ecosystem.
“EMULSION created significant scientific and economic value for all partners, and it is an example of fostering synergistic innovation through close industry-academia ties,” says Prof Ng.
Are you looking for research partners to take your vision to the next step?
1 Global incidence and prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, National Library of Medicine
NAFLD is the excessive accumulation of fat in the liver of patients who consume little to no alcohol. If left untreated, NAFLD could lead to serious liver damage, including cirrhosis (scarring in the liver) or even cancer. NAFLD is prevalent in the region, affecting around 42% of people in Southeast Asia1.
To address the growing public health concern of NAFLD in the Asian population, the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s (A*STAR) Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) collaborated with Novo Nordisk to set up the EMULSION-Novo Nordisk Asian Biomarker Laboratory (ENABL).
The Ensemble of Multi-disciplinary Systems and Integrated Omics for NAFLD (EMULSION) is a fatty liver research programme co-led by the NUS and A*STAR, funded by A*STAR’s Industry Alignment Fund – Pre-positioning Programme.
“We started EMULSION with the aim to define the natural history and disease trajectories of NAFLD in Asians through longitudinal cohort studies, and employ multi-omics approaches to uncover novel disease pathways and subtypes in Asian patients.” says Prof Ng Huck Hui, Lead Principal Investigator of EMULSION.
“By combining clinical expertise from NUS and A*STAR with Novo Nordisk's drug development capabilities, we sought to advance the scientific understanding and therapeutic management of NAFLD in Asia on an unprecedented scale.” explains Assoc Prof Dan Yock Young, Joint Principal Investigator of EMULSION.
Since the establishment of ENABL in 2020, the team has gathered comprehensive clinical, imaging, and multi-omics datasets from more than 400 patients in Singapore. ENABL has also built significant expertise in areas such as human sample taking, DNA library generation and specific circulating biomarker assays.
“This partnership has provided critical human biomarker data to more than 5 five of Novo Nordisk’s projects,” says Dr Karin Conde-Knape, Senior Vice President of Global Drug Discovery at Novo Nordisk.
“It has also led to the development of a very elaborate pipeline for expression profiling analysis of Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) and other patient cohorts, which could potentially be used as a template for similar studies in the future to delineate disease development,” she adds.
Dr Conde-Knape raises the idea of extending the programme to track the collected cohort longitudinally. She points out, “The extensive phenotyping already achieved by the ENABL study presents several potential paths for exploration, making an extension of the programme appealing.”
The collaborative model with Novo Nordisk has cultivated trust between partners and serves as a prototype for subsequent partnerships within Singapore’s research ecosystem.
“EMULSION created significant scientific and economic value for all partners, and it is an example of fostering synergistic innovation through close industry-academia ties,” says Prof Ng.
Are you looking for research partners to take your vision to the next step?
1 Global incidence and prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, National Library of Medicine
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