A New Format · Suits Off · Clinician × Scientist Roundtable

MetaboAsia 2027

A brand new format, and the lectures are gone. Fifteen talks of seven and a half minutes, each answered by the same again from the floor. Doctors, scientists and industry in one room with the suits off, arguing about the landscape rather than presenting their own slides. Come to network, and bring your younger physicians.

When: 2027 · date to be confirmed
Where: NUS Medicine · venue TBC
Format: Half day · 7.5 min talks · 7.5 min Q&A on each
Capacity: Strictly limited seats, RSVP essential
Hosted by: Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS

A new format 7.5 min talks, 7.5 min Q&A No lectures, just a roundtable Suits off & casual Networking > individuals Translational + collaborative Industry in the discussion RSVP, limited seats

RSVP now, limited seats →

A new format · suits off

This isn’t about your work. It’s about the landscape, and how we build it together.

Off the suits, out of the lecture hall. This is a new format: MetaboAsia 2027 puts clinicians, scientists and industry around one table to surface new topics, real collaborations and translational ideas, not individual perks or research. Nobody gets forty minutes to walk us through their own figures. You get seven and a half to make an argument, and the room gets the same to test it.

Want a seat on a panel, bring an industry perspective, or help shape a theme question? We’d love to hear from doctors, scientists and industry across sarcopenia, renal, heart & microvasculature and liver. We especially want younger physicians in the room.

RSVP now, seats are limited →

Want to sit on a panel or bring an industry perspective? Email us.

Few

seats, kept intentionally intimate

50/50

split: 7.5 min talking, 7.5 min answering

slideshows of your own data

The Format

01 / Half the slot is yours, half is theirs

Every talk is seven and a half minutes long. Then seven and a half minutes where the room takes it apart. Nobody gets to fill a slot with their own data, because half the slot was never yours. You get long enough to make one argument properly, and exactly as long again to defend it.

Each talk · 7.5 min

Make one point

Long enough to build a real argument, far too short to walk through a paper. One claim, stated plainly, no methods slide, no acknowledgements page.

Each talk · 7.5 min

The room answers back

An equal share of every slot, and this is half the programme by design. Clinicians, scientists and industry push on the same claim from three directions.

Midday · 90 min

Lunch, booths + posters

An hour and a half for networking over lunch, industry booths and poster presentations, where the collaborations actually start.

Every block also travels the same distance in the same direction. It opens at the bedside and ends at the bench. Someone starts with why the room should care about this patient at all, the middle of the block works through what the trials and the diagnostics can and cannot currently do, and the last talk closes on the biology and what actually reaches the tissue. Speakers are briefed to hand off, so each talk answers the problem the one before it raised.

Four Ways In

02 / Pick your seat

However you join, clinician, scientist or industry, the point is the same: come to spark new topics and collaborations, not to present your own work. It’s casual, it’s about networking, and we especially want younger physicians in the room. If you’re in the audience you’re not a fly on the wall, and with seats this limited they go fast, so RSVP now.

Panel expert

The Doctor

Bring the clinical reality. Sit on a theme panel and pressure test what the science claims against what you see in clinic. Consultants and younger physicians alike.

Panel expert

The Scientist

Bring the mechanism. Sit on a theme panel and show where the biology is heading and, just as honestly, where it’s stuck.

Panel expert

The Biotech

Bring the tools and the pipeline. Sit on a theme panel and show what industry can actually build, scale and deliver, from platforms to therapeutics.

In the room

The Attendee

Not a fly on the wall. Half of this programme is Q&A, seven and a half minutes on every single talk, so come ready to challenge, connect and jump in, and bring a poster if you have one. We genuinely want you talking.

RSVP now, limited seats →

The Day

03 / Three blocks · 15 talks · posters & lunch

The day is built as one argument, not four sessions. We open on the organs metabolic medicine forgets, move to the disease you cannot see on an angiogram, and close on the liver, the one organ here where the drugs finally worked. Inside every block the running order is fixed, opening at the bedside and ending at the bench. Every talk is seven and a half minutes, and then the room gets the same again. Programme in progress. The afternoon has room for further segments.

09:30 – 11:0090 min · 6 talks

The Future of Multi‑Metabolic Health

Sarcopenia

09:30 – 10:15 · 3 × 15 min

Why should anyone care about sarcopenia?

Muscle loss is an outcome multiplier, not a geriatric footnote. It predicts surgical complications, chemotherapy toxicity, decompensation in cirrhosis and mortality on dialysis. And GLP‑1s have made it urgent: we are now inducing lean mass loss at population scale, deliberately, in millions of people.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Why every sarcopenia drug has failed

Bimagrumab, domagrozumab and the wider activin receptor class reliably added muscle mass and reliably failed to add function. Layer on three competing definitions (AWGS 2019, EWGSOP2, SDOC) and no accepted regulatory endpoint, and you have a disease the field cannot define precisely enough to run a winnable trial in.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Novel targets, and the problem of getting into muscle

Past the activin axis sit mitochondrial quality control, the neuromuscular junction, satellite cell exhaustion, apelin and senescence. Then the unglamorous part: muscle is 40% of body mass, so systemic dosing is brutal. What actually reaches a myofibre?

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Renal

10:15 – 11:00 · 3 × 15 min

Why the kidney is the organ metabolic medicine forgets

CKD across Asia is now largely a metabolic disease rather than a glomerular one. Falling eGFR predicts cardiovascular death better than most cardiac markers, and the kidney is where cardiac, hepatic and muscle disease all converge in the same patient, usually without anyone in the room noticing.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Why we find it too late: a broken ruler

Creatinine is a lagging indicator derived from muscle, so the sarcopenic patient’s eGFR flatters them and everything said in the last 45 minutes just became a renal problem. Cystatin C fixes part of it. Albuminuria, the one cheap test that genuinely works, still goes unmeasured in most people with diabetes.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Novel targets, and why the kidney is easier to reach

The four pillars, RAS blockade, SGLT2 inhibitors, finerenone and now GLP‑1s after FLOW, all act upstream on haemodynamics and inflammation, and the disease still progresses. Fibrosis itself remains undrugged. Look instead at the proximal tubule, NLRP3 and complement. Unlike muscle, the kidney filters everything you give it. Easier target, or just the luckier one?

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Block 1 / 3

11:00 – 12:1575 min · 5 talks

The Heart, Vessels & Microvascular Dysfunction

The patient with a clean angiogram and real disease

ANOCA and INOCA, where coronary microvascular dysfunction turns up in roughly half of those actually tested for it. Disproportionately women, routinely discharged as non‑cardiac chest pain, and not remotely benign. Flow reserve and microvascular resistance require somebody to deliberately go looking, and CorMicA showed that stratifying by mechanism improves both angina and quality of life. The same story sits underneath much of HFpEF.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

CKM: one syndrome, four organs, four clinics

The American Heart Association stopped pretending these were separate diseases in 2023 and gave us cardiovascular kidney metabolic syndrome, staged 0 to 4 from dysfunctional adiposity through to clinical cardiovascular disease. Depending on the cohort, 80 to 90% of adults meet criteria for something. So is staging a genuine advance in how we treat people, or an elegant relabelling of what this room already knew? Everything said this morning about muscle and kidney belongs inside this frame.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Residual risk, and the trials meant to settle it

LDL is a solved problem and the events keep coming. Lp(a) has drugs that lower it by more than 90%, and the outcomes trial that would license using them has slipped past its own readout window, so nobody prescribes while the biology looks compelling. Colchicine has been approved since 2023 and sits in the European guidelines, and almost nobody reaches for it. What would actually move either of these into clinic?

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

The endothelium as a metabolic organ

Treat the microvasculature as metabolic tissue rather than plumbing: endothelial insulin resistance, pericyte loss, capillary rarefaction, and the substrate it shares with HFpEF. If the vessel itself is the organ, what is the target, and what reaches a capillary bed you cannot cannulate?

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

If CKM is one syndrome, what is doing the talking?

Staging tells us these organs travel together. It does not tell us what actually carries the signal between them. The candidates are unglamorous and mostly unresolved: FGF23 and klotho, which rise early in kidney disease and drive cardiomyocyte hypertrophy, vascular calcification and endothelial dysfunction; retained uremic solutes; adipokines and the epicardial adipose secretome sitting directly on the myocardium. Find the mediator and CKM stops being a classification and becomes a target.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Block 2 / 3

12:15 – 13:3075 min

Lunch: Networking, Industry Booths & Posters

Midday

13:30 – 14:3060 min · 4 talks

Liver & Multisystemic Disease

Finding the few who will actually die of their liver

Most MASLD is inert and fibrosis stage is the whole game. FIB‑4 into elastography into biomarkers works at population level and produces an enormous false positive burden in exactly the patients we screen hardest. Biopsy is still the reference standard, and it disagrees with itself.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Twenty years of failure, then two approvals in eighteen months

Obeticholic acid, elafibranor, selonsertib and cenicriviroc all died. Then resmetirom arrived in March 2024 and semaglutide in August 2025. The pattern worth arguing about once he sits down: the drugs that won treated the metabolic driver instead of attacking fibrosis head on.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Novel targets past the incretins

FGF21 has become the field’s most expensive bet, and lanifibranor’s phase 3 is the readout everyone is waiting on. Behind them sit pan‑PPAR biology, HSD17B13 silencing, and the fibrogenic pathways nobody has successfully drugged yet.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Why the liver is the easy organ

GalNAc conjugated siRNA handed hepatology a targeting tool that no other organ in this programme has. Which closes the day where it opened: muscle and kidney are not behind on biology, they are behind on addresses. Delivery, not target discovery, has been the bottleneck in every block today.

7.5′ talk · 7.5′ Q&A

Block 3 / 3

Call for posters

Bring your work. Present a poster.

The midday block is a dedicated poster session over a long networking lunch, and it’s where most of the collaborations actually start. Five abstracts also get a three minute pitch to the whole room at 11:45, immediately before everyone breaks, so people know whose board to look for. Abstracts must be submitted in advance, and we favour first authors and younger physicians for the pitch slots.

Submit your abstract →

Faculty

04 / Core & speaking

Core Faculty

Anchoring the programme

Mark Dinesh Muthiah

NUHS, Singapore

Weiting Huang

National Heart Centre Singapore

Mei Chin Lim

NUHS, Singapore

Damien Chua

Nanyang Technological University

Speaking Faculty

Announced soon

Every speaking slot across the day is a single seven and a half minute argument. Every block opens with a clinician and ends with a scientist, with industry partners throughout. Speakers are briefed to hand off so the block builds. Names announced soon.

Doctor

Clinician

Speaking faculty, TBA

Doctor

Clinician

Speaking faculty, TBA

Scientist

PhD

Scientist

Speaking faculty, TBA

Scientist

PhD

Scientist

Speaking faculty, TBA

Industry

IND

Industry

Speaking faculty, TBA

Industry & Partners

05 / In the room, not just on the banner

Industry sits in the conversation here, not just on a sponsor slide. Sequencing and platform partners join the discussion as collaborators, and host booths through the midday session.

A One-Day Biotech Forum

MetaboAsia 2026

A convergence of clinicians, scientists, and industry leaders advancing discovery in cardiometabolic, vascular, muscle and adipose biology — from bench-side breakthroughs to translational reality.

Date: 8 July 2026
Venue: NUS Medicine, LT 35, MD6
Format: One-day in-person symposium
Hosted by: Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS

Programme

— 01 / Schedule

12:30 – 12:40

Opening Addresses

Opening Address (10 min)

Prof. Mark Muthiah — Academia & Biotech: Overview of Metabolic Disease

Opening

12:40 – 13:40

Liver

Clinical Forum Panel Discussion (30 min)

Prof. Mark Muthiah (moderator)
Prof. Hirokazu Takahashi
Asst. Prof. Vincent Chen
Prof. Arun J. Sanyal
Dr. Tsubasa Tsutsumi

Translational Discussion (10 min each)

Prof. Arun J. Sanyal — Future Therapeutic Considerations for MASH
Mr. Damien Chua — Discordance Between In Vivo and Human Models
Assoc. Prof. Torsten Wuestefeld — siRNA Therapy as a Modality for MASH

Track I

13:40 – 14:10

Heart & Vessels

Clinical Forum Panel Discussion (30 min)

Dr. Huang Weiting (moderator)
Prof. Elisa Liehn
Prof. Yeo Khung Keong
Prof. Roger Foo

Track II

14:10 – 14:25

Industry Sharing by Genewiz

Interlude

14:25 – 15:15

Heart & Vessels

Translational Discussion (10 min each)

Asst. Prof. Kazuyuki Kasahara — Gut Microbiome in CVD for Translation
Assoc. Prof. Christine Cheung — Targeting Endothelial Cells as a Therapeutic Node for Metabolic Disorders
Asst. Prof. Ching Jianhong — Metabolomics and the Potential for Translation
Asst. Prof. Federico Tesio Torta — Lipidomics and the Potential for Translation

Biotech Discussion (10 min)

Federico Oldoni

Track II

15:15 – 16:00

Refreshments Break

Break

16:00 – 17:10

Muscle & Adipose

Clinical Forum Panel Discussion (30 min)

Asst. Prof. Ng Cheng Han (moderator)
Asst. Prof. Joon Ho Moon
Asst. Prof. Hun Jee Choe
Dr. Lim Mei Chin
Dr. Tsubasa Tsutsumi

Translational Discussion (10 min each)

Asst. Prof. Tsai Shihyin — Challenges in Translating for Sarcopenia Therapeutics
Prof. Herbert Schwarz — Immune Involvement in Adipocyte Browning
Assoc. Prof. Sunny Wong — Therapeutic Potential of the Microbiome in Obesity

Biotech Discussion (10 min)