Developing Multicenter Consortia in Liver Disease in Latin America: Challenges and Opportunities

The development of consortia has been useful for exploring challenging scenarios and uncharted territories in liver disease treatments. Several consortia already developed in the United States and Europe have become key factors in patient care decision-making processes and medical education, and they have also impacted policy makers' decisions. In Latin America, the situation is different. As a result of a combination of different factors, our region has not been able to develop networking advantages in research and education in liver diseases. Thus far, most of the initial experiences focused on the development of collaborative groups established to investigate a particular topic, which were dissolved once the questions were answered. It is the aim of this review to describe those difficulties we confront in developing multicenter liver consortia in Latin America, to identify those challenges we face, and also to describe the opportunities we have for improvement.