About Decision Sciences
Built on the Biology
Decision Sciences was founded on a single conviction: that the irreversibility of hepatic fibrosis is not a structural fact — it is a biological transition that can be identified, predicted, and intercepted.
Wayne Eskridge
Founder · Decision Sciences
B.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Idaho
Diagnosed with NASH, 2010
Founder, Steatotic Liver Foundation (2017–present)
FDA Advisory Committee advocate
EASL presenter · STAT News · Deseret News
Wayne Eskridge is an electrical engineer with a 50-year career spanning software development, electronics, and executive leadership across startups and Fortune 500 firms. He was diagnosed with NASH in 2010 after years of misdiagnosis — and that experience transformed his trajectory. He applied the same engineering discipline that had driven his technology career to understanding the biology of liver disease at a mechanistic level.
That research led to the founding of the Fatty Liver Foundation in 2017 — now the Steatotic Liver Foundation — a nationally recognized 501(c)(3) that has built relationships with Bristol Myers Squibb, Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, 89bio, Akero Therapeutics, Gilead Sciences, Pfizer, Regeneron, Novo Nordisk, and others. He has advocated before FDA Advisory Committees, presented at EASL, been featured in STAT News and the Deseret News, and published "Dancing with the Dark Angel" — a personal narrative of living with cirrhosis.
Decision Sciences is the next step: taking the mechanistic understanding developed through years of patient advocacy and translating it into a computational platform that can change how the pharmaceutical industry designs trials, how clinicians assess reversibility, and how patients understand what is happening in their own biology. Wayne is actively seeking pharmaceutical partners, clinical research collaborators, and digital health organizations to validate and deploy the sRAGE biomarker strategy and the simulation platform.
The Founding Story
Decision Sciences emerged from a question that no existing model could answer: why do some F2 patients resolve completely after injury removal while others progress to cirrhosis despite perfect adherence? Existing computational frameworks treated fibrosis stage as a label — a snapshot of how much scar tissue was present. They could not explain the divergence. They could not predict who was approaching the point of no return.
The core insight
The insight that changed the framework was recognizing that soluble RAGE — sRAGE — is not a passive biomarker. It is the endogenous brake on the AGE-RAGE positive feedback loop, and its production is directly coupled to viable hepatocyte mass. As fibrosis destroys hepatocytes, the brake collapses. The loop becomes self-sustaining. The transition from injury-dependent to injury-independent fibrosis progression is the mechanistic definition of irreversibility — and it emerges naturally from the model.
That insight drove the development of a 384³ voxel, 14-subsystem, GPU-accelerated agent-based model of the complete hepatic lobule — and the Variational Lagrangian Discretization numerical framework that makes its results resolution-invariant and reproducible across computational platforms. Two provisional patents cover the core innovations. The science is now ready for clinical translation.
Advocacy & Industry Background
Steatotic Liver Foundation
Founded in 2017 as the Fatty Liver Foundation, now the Steatotic Liver Foundation — a nationally recognized 501(c)(3) serving patients across the full spectrum of steatotic liver disease: MASLD, MASH, MetALD, and ALD.
Built from inception to a multi-site web presence with five branded programs across six websites, an annual national care survey, a patient advocacy fellowship, and the Wellness League — a nationwide network connecting patients with clinical trials and community support.
Pharmaceutical Relationships
Educational grants and partnerships secured with leading hepatology-focused pharmaceutical companies:
FDA Advocacy
Advocated before the FDA Advisory Committee for approval of groundbreaking NASH treatments. Published formal responses to ICER evidence reports on NASH therapeutics.
Scientific Engagement
Presenter at EASL 2019. Medical Advisory Board of leading hepatologists including Drs. Stine, Chinchilli, Dinani, Tetri, Friedman, and Bansal.
Public Voice
Featured in STAT News, GE Reports, Deseret News, and Stanford Health publications. Author of "Dancing with the Dark Angel" — a personal narrative of living with cirrhosis.
Mission
To identify the point of maximum therapeutic leverage in hepatic fibrosis — and build the computational tools that let clinicians, researchers, and pharmaceutical developers act on it before the window closes.
Mechanistic Clarity
Every prediction the model makes is grounded in the biology of the AGE-RAGE-sRAGE axis — not statistical correlations. Emergent properties are testable, falsifiable, and traceable to specific biological mechanisms.
Clinical Translation
The model exists to change clinical practice — not to produce papers. The sRAGE biomarker strategy, the F2 intervention window, and the stage-specific therapeutic leverage framework are designed for deployment in clinical trials and patient care.
Pharmaceutical Partnership
RAGE-targeted drug development has been hampered by wrong patients, wrong stage, wrong endpoint. The Decision Sciences platform provides the patient stratification and mechanism validation tools that RAGE/AGE-targeted trials need to succeed.
Work With Us
We are at the stage where the science is ready and the right partnerships will determine how quickly it reaches patients. If you are working on hepatic fibrosis, RAGE-targeted therapeutics, or computational biology in liver disease — we want to hear from you.
Get in Touch