Velacur^TM Results Presented at AASLD’s The Liver Meeting 2020

At the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases’ (AASLD) The Liver Meeting 2020, Sonic Incytes presented the results of its clinical trial using the Velacur^TM prototype, a novel medical technology that measures liver elasticity and attenuation.

This trial was an initial study to evaluate the ability of the Velacur^TM prototype to differentiate between healthy volunteers and those with clinically diagnosed non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) or previous Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. 50 healthy volunteers and 86 patients with a history of fibrosis were recruited from four centers in the United States and Canada: Southern California Liver Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, LAIR Centre, and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute.

This study showed that Velacur^TM could discriminate between these two groups with high accuracy, with an AUC of greater than 0.85 in both fibrosis and steatosis.

As an exploratory objective of the study, a limited number of patients underwent MR Elastography for comparison. The results showed Velacur^TM having diagnostic accuracy comparable to MRE/MRI. The concordance coefficient, or the 1-to-1 comparison to MRE, was approximately 0.80 for Velacur^TM in comparison to FibroScan’s 0.39.  When comparing to MRI PDFF, the correlation coefficient for Velacur^TM was 0.78.

Representing one of the centers involved in the study, Dr. Nezam Afdhal, Chief of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, spoke about the study and the value of Velacur^TM on the November 14, 2020, episode of the Surfing the NASH Tsunami podcast: “This has significant potential, as we move forward, not just for patients that we are diagnosing in our clinics with liver disease, but also as a screening tool for its utilization in high-risk populations.”

To learn more about this study, read the AASLD Poster or listen to Dr. Afdhal’s podcast interview.

Further studies are underway to compare Velacur’s ability to discriminate between stages of fibrosis and steatosis.