New Device to Evaluate How the Liver Metabolizes Drugs

The liver plays a central role in metabolizing drugs. However, the compounds that get released during that process might have potential toxic effects on other organs of our body. This knowledge is fundamental for the design of pro-drugs—medications that when first administered are in a pharmacologically inactive form before being converted through metabolization into an active form. Scientists at the Center for Engineering in Medicine in Boston, Mass., have recently developed a new device suitable for culturing both primary liver cells and cancer cells in two microchambers separated by a tissue-culture membrane, which allows a partial co-culture mix of the two different cell types. By using this device, scientists have analyzed the effects of Tegafur, a chemotherapeutic pro-drug that gets transformed by hepatic cells into 5-fluorouracil, a toxic compound able to affect cancer cell growth, thus proving the suitability of the system to analyze pro-drugs’ effects in vitro.