ERN RARE-LIVER Webinar Series 17 November 2026: Current Medical and Surgical Management of Alveolar Echinococcosis

This ERN RARE-LIVER Webinar on 17 November 2026 at 5pm (CET) will be a webinar from the ERN RARE-LIVER Alveolar Echinococcosis Group.

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Please use this link:  https://uke-de.zoom-x.de/j/62903918563?pwd=KjvpaDAGTwa2SFigJqa52noySzaQO0.1 

Moderators:

  • Beate Grüner (University of Ulm, Germany)
  • Severin Gloor (Inselspital Bern, Switzerland)

Speakers:

  • Olivier Detry (University of Liège, Belgium)
  • Solange Bresson (University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland)

Background: Alveolar echinococcosis (AE) is a rare but potentially life-threatening parasitic disease caused by Echinococcus multilocularis, predominantly affecting the liver with an infiltrative growth pattern. Without appropriate treatment, AE may lead to progressive destruction of hepatic structures, vascular and biliary complications, and extrahepatic spread.

Management is complex and requires close multidisciplinary collaboration. Complete surgical resection remains the only potentially curative treatment and should be considered whenever technically feasible. Advances in hepatobiliary surgery, including extended liver resections, vascular reconstruction, and selected approaches for extrahepatic disease, have expanded the boundaries of resectability, albeit at the cost of potentially increased morbidity.

At the same time, medical therapy represents a cornerstone of AE management. Many patients present with unresectable locally advanced or extrahepatic disease, are not suitable candidates for major surgery due to frailty or comorbidities, or require perioperative antiparasitic treatment. Long-term benzimidazole therapy can achieve durable disease control and has substantially improved the prognosis of patients with non-resectable AE. Increasing experience with individualized treatment strategies, therapeutic drug and toxicity monitoring, management of adverse effects, and assessment of disease activity has further improved medical management. In carefully selected patients with persistently inactive disease, treatment discontinuation followed by structured surveillance or a watch-and-wait strategy may also be considered. Nevertheless, defining disease activity, optimal treatment duration, and criteria for safely discontinuing therapy remains challenging.

Because AE is rare, expertise is concentrated in specialized centers and management strategies may differ between institutions. This webinar will provide a multidisciplinary and practical overview of contemporary medical and surgical management of AE, with particular emphasis on individualized treatment selection, medical therapy, assessment of resectability, and areas where evidence or consensus remains limited.

Points/aspects:

  • Treatment algorithm and multidisciplinary decision-making – selecting between surgery, medical therapy and watch-and-wait approaches.
  • Medical treatment of AE – benzimidazole therapy, monitoring, adverse effects, duration of treatment and criteria for treatment discontinuation.
  • Surgical treatment and assessment of resectability – indications, surgical margins and contemporary limits of resection.
  • Unresolved questions and future perspectives – recurrence, long-term surveillance, biomarkers of parasite activity and the role of specialized multidisciplinary AE centres.

Short bios

Beate Grüner is a senior physician at the Department of Internal Medicine III and heads the Infectious Diseases Division.  After completing her habiliation on the topic of Alveolar Echinococcosis, she was appointed adjunct Professor at the Ulm University in 2021. She has been involved in the clinical care of patients with echinococcosis since January 2000, where she helped to establish the patient cohort for alveolar echinococcosis, which now comprises more than 850 patients from across the Federal Republic of Germany. In addition to providing direct patient care in Ulm, Dr Grüner and her team advise medical colleagues throughout Germany and abroad on the clinical management of patients with echinococcosis. Under her leadership, the weekly Infectious Diseases Board meets to present echinococcosis patients from across the region and discuss them in an interdisciplinary setting.  The constant, close contact with patients leads to a lively exchange and discussion of open questions and topics, and serves as a direct driving force for clinical research, with the aim of improving clinical management and providing real benefits to those affected. In addition to the management of alveolar- und cystic echinococcosis, her clinical and scientific focus areas include infections in immunocompromised patients, including HIV/AIDS, complex tuberculosis, fungal infections, and differential diagnosis of focal liver lesions.

Severin Gloor is a Consultant Surgeon at the Department of Visceral Surgery and Medicine at Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, Switzerland, and currently a Fellow in Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary (HPB) Surgery at the Department of General, Visceral and Transplant Surgery at University Hospital Münster, Germany. His clinical and academic focus is on hepatobiliary surgery, with a particular interest in the multidisciplinary management of hepatic alveolar echinococcosis (AE). He has been involved in the treatment and research of AE at Inselspital Bern and has contributed to clinical studies on surgical treatment, postoperative surveillance and biomarkers in AE, as well as to European collaborative research on the epidemiology of the disease. He is a leading member of the Alveolar Echinococcosis Working Group of ERN RARE-LIVER. During the webinar, he will contribute the surgical perspective to the multidisciplinary discussion, with a particular focus on the role and timing of surgery, assessment of resectability, and the evolving boundaries between surgical and non-surgical management of AE.

Olivier Detry is Professor of Surgery at the University of Liège, Belgium, and Clinical Head of the Department of Visceral and Transplantation Surgery at the University Hospital (CHU) of Liège, where he leads liver surgery and transplantation activities. For more than 25 years, he has been involved in the management of patients with Alveolar Echinococcosis (AE) in Belgium. He founded ECHINO-Liège (www.echinococcose.be), a multidisciplinary team of physicians, microbiologists, and veterinarians dedicated to the care of patients with alveolar and cystic echinococcosis, and providing advice on the management of national and international cases. The Department of Microbiology of CHU Liège has been designated the Belgian National Reference Center for Echinococcosis. His presentation will focus on the role of surgical resection and liver transplantation in the management of Alveolar Echinococcosis.

Solange BRESSON-HADNI is an Honorary Professor of Hepatology at Marie and Louis Pasteur University, Besançon, France, expert consultant for the National Echinococcoses Reference Center at the University Hospital of Besançon, France and for the Tropical and Humanitarian Diseases Department at the University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland. A major part of her research work has been dedicated to the care management of patients suffering from alveolar and cystic echinocococcoses (AE and CE). She was involved in the first attempts at liver transplantation for AE. Under the aegis of Santé Publique France, she helped establish the national AE registry, FrancEchino, which was launched in 1982 and currently includes nearly 1000 patients. More recently, she launched the national CE observatory, Ofrekys. Dr Bresson-Hadni spearheaded the establishment of a national multidisciplinary consultation meeting at the University Hospital of Besançon to discuss difficult AE or CE cases treated in France and beyond. She also helped establish the Swiss Echino Network in 2019 and has been involved in its coordination over the past few years. Solange BRESSON-HADNI is a member of the AIREA (Association for Information and Research on Alveolar Echinococcosis) board. This association was founded in Besançon more than 20 years ago and brings together physicians, AE patients and their families. It works to raise awareness about this rare disease, share information on therapeutic advances, disseminate information on its prevention and support newly diagnosed patients.