Mice With Humanized Livers Improve Early Drug Testing
Date: 7.11.2012
Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have used bioengineered mice with livers composed largely of human cells to characterize a drug about to enter early-stage clinical development for combating hepatitis C.
Tests using the new mouse model accurately predicted significant aspects of the drug's behavior in humans -- including its interaction with another drug and the profile of its major breakdown products in the body (called metabolites) -- far more accurately than would have been achieved using current methods.
The study was published online Oct. 31 inthe Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Its findings hold potentially huge implications for drug development in general, because key aspects of the tested drug's activity and properties would likely have gone unnoticed using the kind of mouse study that is the current standard for preclinical tests of candidate drugs. Importantly, the results strongly hint that the drug, clemizole, could be both safe and an effective drug-cocktail component in humans infected with HCV, the virus that causes hepatitis C.
