Non-Alcoholic SteatoHepatitis (NASH) is an unmet medical need and is becoming the leading cause of liver transplant. No FDA-approved therapies and a meager diagnosis, it poses a unique challenge in the design of studies for NASH. Therefore, there is a worldwide need for new therapies to treat the global epidemic of NASH and the cost to society will be huge if it is not addressed in the upcoming years! Besides, scarcity of treatment options, there is also an urgent unmet need to develop biomarkers that facilitate the diagnosis, identification of populations at risk, assessment of disease progression or regression, and/or response to treatment. The potential market is gigantic with analysts predicting north of $35bn by 2025!

Many small players are currently developing drugs on their own and with such a large unmet need, market potential and disease heterogeneity, we expect many Giants to join this race and thus, we can see more Licensing deals/ M&A activity on the horizon! In light of recent developments in NASH, we have added few in-depth coverage of companies which either target early-stage NASH, late-stage NASH, or large pts pool-NAFLD in our Outlook this year.