In vitro Toxicology

In vitro Toxicology

Drug toxicity, often manifested as liver toxicity, is a key reason for attrition. Identifying potential toxicity at an early stage in drug, agrochemical or chemical development can save both time and developmental costs, and most importantly reduce the likelihood of late stage failure.

KaLy-Cell is the ideal partner to assist you in determining and understanding the liver-mediated toxic liability of your compounds using in vitro cultured hepatocytes. Our focus on state of the art culture and biochemical techniques allow for high quality data to be generated rapidly and cost-effectively. To that end, KaLy-Cell is actively involved in several R&D projects to improve the understanding and prediction of toxicological events and allows for a better understanding of the mechanisms of drug toxicity, including species-specificity.

We provide:

• Highly reproducible, accurate data – validated and used by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, agrochemical and cosmetics companies, and academic organizations.

• Delivery of data within several weeks at reception of compounds, to fit in with the make-test timelines in drug discovery. A number of different reporting options are available.

• Attention to good quality customer care, with highly trained Scientists on hand to explain results and suggest the most appropriate experimental strategy.

• Flexibility – studies can be tailored to our customers’ specific requirements.
• Regulations – our services maintain and comply with regulatory guidelines providing constant confidence in the data.

Drug Induced Liver Injury

KaLy-Cell offers innovative in vitro read outs of toxicity such as Drug Induced Liver Injury (DILI) prediction services (learn more about DILI prediction on PubMed) by measuring separately, or combined, in hepatocytes from various species, the end-points listed below:

• Cell viability - general cell viability assessment using single endpoints such as mitochondrial resazurin metabolism, LDH release or ATP content,
• Oxidative Stress - to address hepatic disorders of detoxification pathways,
• Steatosis – to address hepatic lipid processing disorder, leading to accumulation of triglycerides within the liver cells,
• Cholestasis – to address bile acid homeostasis disorder in hepatocytes, leading to bile acid accumulation within liver cells, by determining a Drug-Induced-Cholestasis Index (DICI) (learn more about DICI on PubMed)

Acute and Chronic Toxicity

KaLy-Cell offers innovative in vitro read outs of acute and chronic toxicity in hepatocytes from various species (learn more about long-term 2D sandwich cultures on PubMed)

• Changes in gene expression – using RT-qPCR or transcriptomic signature to understand toxicologically relevant changes in gene expression in hepatocytes from various species
• Induction or inhibition of major liver metabolic enzymes – using RT-qPCR for enzyme expression and LC/MS detection of reaction products for enzyme activities, in order to evaluate risk of xenobiotic-induced liver injury, drug-drug interactions or pathologies related to liver metabolism, in particular those due to inhibition and/or induction of enzymes involved in the metabolism of endogenous or exogenous compounds
• Customized service - flexible service where we can investigate endpoints and time points in hepatocytes from various species to address particular customer issues.