The liver is one of the most critical organs in the human body, acting as the primary metabolic regulator.
The liver performs multiple functions, including bile acid formation, protein catabolism, and drug metabolism, through the coordinated activity of parenchymal cells, primarily hepatocytes, and non-parenchymal support cells, like Kupffer and hepatic stellate cells.
This makes in vitro human liver models critical for drug development and toxicology assays, especially as animal models often fail to predict human-specific hepatotoxicity. While primary human hepatocytes (PHHs) are the historical gold standard, applying them into scalable, long-term studies has limitations. In 2D culture, PHHs rapidly de-differentiate and lose metabolic activity within days. In addition to this short functional window, PHHs have inherent donor-to-donor variability, meaning that scientists often compromise and rely on immortalised carcinoma cell lines that fail to capture human metabolic biology.
91探花鈥檚 opti-ox deterministic cell programming technology enables the generation of functional human iPSC-derived ioHepatocytes with unmatched lot-to-lot consistency at scale that exhibit sustained albumin secretion and mature phenotype for over two weeks. By overcoming the donor variability and the short functional window associated with PHHs, ioHepatocytes provide a physiologically relevant, functional human cell model for in vitro ADME-Tox profiling and drug-induced liver injury (DILI) screening in the drug discovery pipeline.
