Liver Models Go to Market
New models of the human liver will help uncover toxicity problems before drugs reach the clinic.
By Katherine Bourzac
Drug-induced toxicity is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States. Traditional drug-screening tests sometimes fail to uncover potential toxicity problems before drugs reach, or even pass, clinical trials. This puts patients at risk and leads to recalls that are costly for pharmaceutical companies. Now two MIT groups that have been developing new systems for modeling the human liver in the lab are forming startups to bring their products to the market.
TE-bio, founded by Linda Griffith, Steven Tannenbaum, and Walker Inman will launch next year in collaboration with Dupont and is talking with Pfizer as a potential research partner. Their microscale liver tissues are three-dimensional. Hepregen, founded by Sangeeta Bhatia and Salman Khetani, has developed cell cultures that consist of plates with multiple wells, each of which contains two-dimensional, structured growths of liver cells surrounded by supportive cells. Hepregen is currently raising money and talking with Merck and Novartis. Both models function better than the traditional cell cultures used by drug companies because they attempt to mimic the structural complexity of the human liver.
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This week, Bhatia and Khetani published a paper in Nature Biotechnology that describes the liver-like functions of the cells in their cultures. They make the cultures by seeding liver cells on plastic plates that are micropatterned with circular spots of collagen.
Ismailimail 
This is a real scientific and technological marvel, creating layered cultures of liver cells architectured around an artificial template that mimics the actual complex structure of a liver cell in the liver organ itself. This provides a more realistic picture of how a drug molecule actually meanders its way through the cell labyrinthe and is eventually chemically changed by the machinery of the liver cell to then be excreted from the body as waste in its less toxic form. This cell culture system allows scientists and physicians to tell beforehand if a new drug will be more beneficial than harmful to a patient or vice versa. This is a perfect marriage of knowledge(asking: what is the universe made up of and how does it operate?) and service to humanity. It reminds me of the following excerpt:
“A thousand years ago, my forefathers, the Fatimid imam-caliphs of Egypt, founded al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. In the Islamic tradition, they viewed the discovery of knowledge as a way to understand, so as to serve better God’s creation, to apply knowledge and reason to build society and shape human aspirations”(Aga Khan IV, 25th June 2004, Matola, Mozambique)
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