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ACT 2024
The 45th Annual Meeting will include a wide-ranging scientific program and educational courses, with distinguished plenary speakers, the popular Poster Session, an Awards Ceremony, and multiple professional networking events.
We had a great time at ACT!
Poster Session
Human and preclinical animal microphysiological systems for assessing drug-induced liver injury during drug development.
Drug induced liver injury (DILI) remains a common cause for acute liver failure and the attrition of compounds in drug development. New approach methodologies (NAMs) offer promise to increase the efficiency of drug development by detecting DILI earlier. The use of microphysiological systems (MPS) address the shortcomings in current drug development, by improving translation of preclinical results and thus accelerating safety evaluation. The adoption of these more advanced in vitro approaches is therefore inevitable to de-risk workflows and offset the trend towards more costly and limited animal use.
The PhysioMimix® Organ-on-a-Chip (OOC) system was used to develop DILI assays using human or preclinical animal liver MPS. Perfused scaffolds were utilized to generate 3D microtissues from primary hepatocyte and Kupffer cells. Plates containing either 12 or 48 individual chips were deployed during drug development to accurately predict the human DILI risk of candidates.
Superior sensitivity and specificity versus alternative models were demonstrated (sensitivity 100%, accuracy 85%) using reference compounds (IQ MPS Consortium) using the Liver-12 plate. ALT levels matched clinically based severity gradings, defined by the DILI Network (DILIN). Dog and rat MPS were tested against a panel of compounds to qualify their use in predicting species specific effects, mimicking known in vivo and clinical data. The preclinical animal DILI assays can inform the design of in vivo studies to predict interspecies differences. Together, these MPS systems bridge the gap by providing data to refine pre-clinical in vivo experimental design, reduce drug attrition rates and safeguard animal use.
Poster board: P561
Presenter: Alysha Bray, CN Bio
Date: Monday 18 November
Time: 17:00 – 18:30
Our Team at ACT 2024
Alysha
Alysha Bray is a Scientist in the Toxicology Assay Development team at CN Bio. She joined the team in 2018 as a Research Assistant and has led and helped develop many of CN Bio’s MPS models. Alysha is highly experienced in cell biology and MPS model development. She completed her MSc in cell and gene therapy at University College London (UCL), looking into the epigenetic DNA modifications of lentiviral vectors. She now leads R&D projects within the CN Bio team revolving around toxicology using liver and other MPS organ models.
Emily
Dr Emily Richardson is a Lead Scientist in the R&D team at CN Bio. She joined the team in 2020 as a Senior Scientist and lead the development of the PhysioMimix® lung and lung-liver MPS models. Emily is highly experienced in the application of complex cell biology to drug discovery, having previously worked in cellular therapeutics in an industry setting and as a trained biochemist with specialty in molecular biology. She completed her PhD at the University of Leicester, using 3D cell culture to determine molecular mechanisms driving highly metastatic lung cancers. She now leads R&D projects within the CN Bio team revolving around toxicology in the liver and the lung MPS, as well as driving collaborative projects with various academic, industry and regulatory partners.
Dave
Dave recently joined CN Bio in February 2024 as Sales Manager for the Western U.S. Dave brings 20+ years of award-winning lab platform sales experience across several different diagnostics markets. In the past 10 years, he gained valuable experience expanding business into molecular reference labs and biotech’s in the West area. Most recently, Dave was the Regional Business Manager at Bionano Genomics selling Optical Genome Mapping on Saphyr System to Biotech’s who specialize in Cell and Gene Tx space. Dave looks forward to being a part of moving CN Bio Organ on Chip technology from start up to scale in the next few years.