Tissue Solutions is pleased to offer an exciting new human hepatoma cell line, HepaRG™, for toxicology and ADME research (absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion).
Derived from a human liver progenitor cell line, HepaRG exhibits the characteristics of primary hepatocytes while providing the convenience and reproducibility of cyropreserved cells. The cells have several unique features including undifferentiated morphology, expression of key metabolic enzymes, retention of all nuclear receptors and drug transporters and are the only cell line that exhibits major cytochrome P450 activities at levels comparable to primary hepatocytes.
At Tissue Solutions we are seeing rapid growth in the use of hepatocytes and other human-based toxicology models at an early stage in the drug discovery process, as clients screen out candidates with poor ADME properties. Traditionally, toxicology was the final hurdle in the drug development pipeline but high failure rates have encouraged a new approach and ‘fail early, fail cheap’ is the new pharmaceutical mantra, with companies keen to reduce attrition and boost success rates.
HepaRG cells are an exciting and valuable in vitro human model for the drug discovery process and they complement the range of tissues and products we can already offer. Potential research applications include a range of liver metabolism and toxicology functions such as predicting metabolism based drug-drug interactions, assessing potential transported-mediated drug interactions and metabolic stability.