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Liver-on-a-Chip: A New Paradigm for Drug Safety Assessment
Ichor Life Sciences has partnered with Xellar Biosystems to offer robust organ-on-a-chip services. Liver organ-on-a-chip is an advanced in vitro, human-based living-cell model that integrates microfluidic engineering with tissue engineering to reconstitute essential hepatic microanatomy and functions.
Service Workflow
Within the microfluidic device, human hepatocytes can be maintained in long-term, stable culture with sustained viability and metabolic competence. Using a multiparametric panel of readouts-including cell viability, albumin secretion, alanine aminotransferase (ALT) release/activity, and morphological assessments-the platform enables rigorous assessment of a drug's potential hepatotoxic liability. Compared with traditional animal studies and 2D cell culture, the liver OoC demonstrates improved human relevance and translational predictive performance, offering a more forward-looking tool for new drug development and safety evaluation.
Robust validation
>30 compounds, 7 endpoints, and multiple donors.
Human relevance
Data-driven decisions with greater confidence.
High throughput
Scalable design enabling translational capacity.
Proven Reliability
Validated performance on reference compounds.
FDA
Validated and aligned with regulatory objectives.
Application Scenarios
Use our liver-on-a-chip models to anticipate potential liver injury early in development, improving translatability over traditional in vitro assays.
Leverage microphysiological systems to assess how investigational compounds may interact with co-administered drugs under physiologically relevant conditions.
Employ liver-on-a-chip platforms to study absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and interactions in a human-relevant context.
Model mechanism-driven hepatotoxicity using liver microenvironments to uncover pathways of injury and identify biomarkers.
Enable extended culture and repeated dosing studies on liver chips to evaluate chronic exposure and cumulative toxicity.
Use insights from chip-based assays to refine chemical structures and reduce hepatotoxic liability in high-risk drug candidates.
Provide data from validated liver-on-a-chip studies to support regulatory filings and advance the adoption of non-animal safety testing methods.
Your Results Await
We capture each drug's unique, dose-dependent response through mechanism-driven assays and apply robust analytics to accurately predict toxicity-enabling safer, smarter drug development.
Featured Case Studies / Capabilities
Xellar Liver Chip Predicts Clinical Liver Toxicity Where Animal Models Fail
Tolcapone shows toxicity at low margin of exposure while its structural analog entacapone does not.
Xellar Liver Chip model detects simvastatin toxicity where Other in-vitro Models Fail
Other in-vitro models in 2D culture or as 3D spheroids reported an IC50/Cmax >200 or undetermined.