“Primary sclerosing cholangitis represents the greatest unmet need in liver medicine,” Dr Palak Trivedi. PSC is a rare and complex disease with no proven treatment. It can lead to liver failure requiring a life-saving liver transplant and is associated with aggressive, hard-to-detect cancers. Despite research advances in the last decade, we still do not fully understand why someone gets PSC or how to slow it down. PSC patients also live with debilitating daily symptoms such as itch and fatigue.

We will make our funds go further by providing pump priming funding to allow researchers to generate proof-of-concept data that can then be used to help secure larger-scale funding. We will embed the patient voice into this process by inviting the PSC community to vote on which research proposal we should fund, once our Scientific Review Committee has shortlisted the applications. This aligns with our Research Priority to champion the voice of people with PSC to influence and shape PSC research.