BLB. The chip that simulates human liver tissue to develop drugs

Jordi Gracia-Sancho

IDIBAPS, Intsitut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer, Spain

Research
ExoLiver Therapeutics will provide laboratory services and consulting in toxicology, drug development and liver diseases. The main feature of ExoLiver Therapeutics is the “Liver on a Chip” platform, which offers preclinical data with higher quality and reliability than current available devices.

The Liver on a Chip Platform allows long-term culture of human hepatocytes, mimicking the liver environment, thus allowing proper drug screening and toxicology testing.

Aim
ExoLiver Therapeutics will work with pharma companies, other CROs, and research labs to accelerate and improve the development of new pharmaceutical compounds. The unique services offered will significantly reduce the global cost of brining new chemical compounds to the market, together with providing more reliable biochemical data.

Problem to Solve
Drug development main hurdle is to correctly identify candidates that show low liver toxicity in late clinical phase trials. Drug Induced Liver injury (DILI) has led to halt the development of several drugs in advanced stages, as well as withdrawal from the market of drugs that had already been granted approval.

It is estimated that liver toxicity accounts for the removal of 25-40% of drugs in clincal phase III, and 20-30% of withdrawals once the drug has already hit the market. Therefore, there is a clear need to incorporate experimental methods that allow a more reliable prediction of hepatotoxicity in the pre-clinical development of a drug beyond standard 2D hepatocyte cultures. Moreover, development of new compounds for liver diseases require expert knowledge and advisor, which will also be offered by ExoLiver.

Innovation
The analysis of new drugs and biomolecules by the Liver on a Chip device offers a new quality level, as it predicts toxicity of drugs before being administered to humans, as well as a complete biochemical and cellular characterization of any given compound in human liver cells.

Level of Innovation
The Liver on a Chip device is a new technology that yields unprecedented results, as it mimics the architecture of the human liver, in terms of circulation, cell types and available area to carry out cell biology studies. Thus, it represents a novel exciting technology to test compounds for their safety profiles. It also allows functional studies to understand the efficacy and mechanisms of action of new drugs.