Researchers at Empiriko Corporation have developed a chemosynthetic liver, which may replace animal testing as a way to examine the safety of pharmaceutical products.
The fake liver was introduced on Tuesday at the 247th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, according to Discovery News.
Mukund Chorghade, chief scientific officer at Empiriko and president of THINQ Pharma, spoke in a press release about the benefits that the fake liver has over using animals to test drugs.
"Researchers in drug discovery make small quantities of new potential drug compounds and then test them in animals," Chorghade said. "It is a very painstaking, laborious and costly process. Frequently, scientists have to sacrifice many animals, and even after all that, the results are not optimal."
The fake liver works by imitating a group of enzymes in the liver, Fox News reported. Chorghade, the lead researcher, said the project acts as a stand-in for the human liver, which is an important organ needed for distributing small molecule drugs.
"Whenever we take a medicine, our liver enzymes start acting on that particular drug," Chorghade said. "The livers are the organs by which drugs get distributed in the human body, and they are the primary method of excretion, because you don't want the drug accumulating in your body."
Researchers can conduct metabolic profiling by mixing drug compounds with chemosynthetic livers in a test tube. Scientists are able to see how well the drug is broken down, and the fake livers speed up the decomposition process. As a result, scientists are able to see results faster on a larger scale than they would with animal testing, Fox News reported.
"My testing reproduces the chemical structures of these metabolites- whatever these animals produce after taking the drug," Chorghade said. "Plus, much of this [current] metabolite testing occurs in milligram quantities, but mine occurs in gram quantities."
The fake livers have not been approved to replace animal tests yet, Discovery News reported. While Chorghade's research team has successfully tested more than 50 drugs with the stand-in, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires at least 100 drugs to be tested for regulatory approval.
However, the researchers said the fake livers can be used to detoxify blood for liver transplant patients, which gives the stand-in a good chance of gaining approval. They added that their new tests can help predict side effects when several drugs are taken together.
