Open Project Support of 9 million NOK for 3 years has been awarded from South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority for the project “Decoding bile duct disease for drug and biomarker development in primary sclerosing cholangitis (DecodePSC)”.
Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is an inflammatory disease of the intrahepatic and extrahepatic bile ducts with no effective treatment. Current biomarkers for PSC monitor secondary liver damage caused from destruction of the bile ducts and are unreliable for predicting disease outcomes.
“A major obstacle hindering new treatments is the poor understanding of which disease processes destroy the bile ducts versus those that are secondary and originating from the damaged liver”, explains Brian K. Chung, a co-applicant of DecodePSC.
To bridge this knowledge gap, DecodePSC will assess the extrahepatic bile ducts which are outside the liver, separated from the secondary liver signals that have confounded previous studies of the intrahepatic bile ducts.
Chung adds, “The extrahepatic bile ducts have thus far been understudied due to methodological limitations, but in DecodePSC we will leverage our access to explanted liver material including the extrahepatic bile ducts and the newest advances in spatial transcriptomics to pinpoint the cell types and molecular interactions driving biliary inflammation in PSC.”
Photo: UiO.
Professor Espen Melum, senior gastroenterologist, NoPSC group leader and co-applicant of DecodePSC says, “With this new knowledge, we can potentially identify novel drug targets and biomarkers for PSC that will improve and inform future patient care.”
DecodePSC starts in February 2026 and will be led by Professor Tom Hemming Karlsen.
Professor Espen Melum and Senior Researcher Brian K. Chung are the co-Principal Investigators.