Drug induced fatty liver disease (DIFLD) is a form of drug-induced liver injury (DILI), which can also be included in the more general metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), which specifically refers to the accumulation of fat in the liver unrelated to alcohol intake. A bi-directional relationship between DILI and MASLD is likely to exist: while certain drugs can cause MASLD by acting as pro-steatogenic factors, MASLD may make hepatocytes more vulnerable to drugs. Having a pre-existing MASLD significantly heightens the likelihood of experiencing DILI from certain medications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: High-throughput pharmaco-toxicological testing frequently relies on the use of established liver-derived cell lines, such as HepG2 cells. However, these cells often display limited hepatic phenotype and features of neoplastic transformation that may bias the interpretation of the results. Alternate models based on primary cultures or differentiated pluripotent stem cells are costly to handle and difficult to implement in high-throughput screening platforms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe diagnosis of inherited metabolic disorders is a long and tedious process. The matching of clinical data with a genomic variant in a specific metabolic pathway is an essential step, but the link between a genome and the clinical data is normally difficult, primarily for new missense variants or alterations in intron sequences. Notwithstanding, elucidation of the pathogenicity of a specific variant might be critical for an accurate diagnosis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAutologous cell replacement therapy for inherited metabolic disorders requires the correction of the underlying genetic mutation in patient's cells. An unexplored alternative for females affected from X-linked diseases is the clonal selection of cells randomly silencing the X-chromosome containing the mutant allele, without in vivo or ex vivo genome editing. In this report, we have isolated dermal fibroblasts from a female patient affected of ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency and obtained clones based on inactivation status of either maternally or paternally inherited X chromosome, followed by differentiation to hepatocytes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTypical protocols to differentiate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from hepatocyte-like cells (HLCs) imply complex strategies that include transfection with key hepatic transcription factors and the addition to culture media of nutrients, growth factors, and cytokines. A main constraint to evaluate the hepatic phenotype achieved arises from the way the grade of differentiation is determined. Currently, it relies on the assessment of the expression of a limited number of hepatic gene transcripts, less frequently by assessing certain hepatic metabolic functions, and rarely by the global metabolic performance of differentiated cells.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFREACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) is a global strategy and regulation policy of the EU that aims to improve the protection of human health and the environment through the better and earlier identification of the intrinsic properties of chemical substances. It entered into force on 1st June 2007 (EC 1907/2006). REACH and EU policies plead for the use of robust high-throughput "omic" techniques for the in vitro investigation of the toxicity of chemicals that can provide an estimation of their hazards as well as information regarding the underlying mechanisms of toxicity.
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