Lab Grown Cells Offer Hope for New Liver Disease Treatments
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BBSRC and the Medical Research Council (MRC) funded Dr David Hay from the University of Edinburgh to develop a process for creating liver cells from human stem cells, and scaling this up so that shipment could be made to the USA.
In the United States pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb paid for the work of Dr Oliver Flint, which showed that the stem-cell derived liver cells detected up to 75% of 20 known liver toxins when incubated at various concentrations over a week. This was the equivalent performance to cells biopsied from human livers; the current option in these kinds of tests.
This robust cell-based model therefore faithfully predicted the potential for human drug-induced liver injury and could play an important role in developing renewable cell-based therapies for liver disease. Using stem cell derived liver cells offers advantages over using cells taken from human livers, which are limited in supply and variable in performance due to isolation from low quality tissue fragments unsuitable for organ transplantation.
The paper "Accurate Prediction of Drug Induced Liver Injury Using Stem Cell-Derived Populations" is published in Stem Cells Translational Medicine and is available online.
