I am really enjoying this meeting. This is an outstanding meeting. We have more than 9500 attendees from 127 countries with over 2500 abstracts. The EASL Governing Board has again set up an outstanding scientific program. At the start of the meeting, we ran the Post-graduate Course on the multidisciplinary approach to common liver diseases, including NAFLD, alcohol, HCC, cholestatic disease and complications of cirrhosis. The Post-graduate Course was very well attended. In parallel, we ran the Basic Science Course on regenerative medicine.
As highlights of this meeting, we have two State-of-the-Art Lectures. One is the Jean-Pierre Benhamou Clinical State-of-the-Art to be given by Vincenzo Mazzaferro (Italy) on the indications for transplantation in HCC. The Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer Basic State-of-the-Art will be given by Mike Hall from Switzerland on cell growth control in cancer therapy. Additionally, we conduct Joint Sessions. We have a Joint Session with APASL on HCC with perspectives from the East and the West. We also have a Fusion Session focusing on hepatitis C. In the Scientific Program, it is interesting to see how the landscape is changing with the cure for hepatitis C. The meeting is showing greater variety in terms of the range of topics. Of course, there is a lot of interest in NAFLD and HCC, also in hepatitis B, but there are new emerging topics such as cholestatic liver, for example.
Today with hepatitis C treatment, we can achieve very high sustained virus response rates/cure rates above 90%. We can cure most patients with cirrhosis. The focus is moving towards the management of post-SVR complications including occurrence and recurrence of HCC after DAAs. This is still a controversial topic and we witnessed a very interesting session today at the meeting on this topic. We are also focusing on specific subgroups like cirrhotic genotype 3 patients who are non-responders, patients who are on the waiting list for liver transplantation, and patients with kidney disease. Another important aspect is access to treatment.