Bionas and Primacyt to cooperate on cell-based assay for predicting liver toxicity

2 October 2006

Rostock and Schwerin, Germany. Bionas a specialist for in vitro profiling the metabolic activity of cells, and PRIMACYT have entered into a cooperation aimed at the development of a cell-based assay using primary human hepatocytes for prediction of hepatotoxic effects in response to test compounds.

Primary human hepatocytes, provided by PRIMACYT, are cultivated directly on collagen-coated Bionas metabolic chips SC1000 with PRIMACYT´s proprietary and chemically defined media. The chips are then placed into the Bionas 2500 analyzing system to evaluate the effect of test compounds. After a recovery period the hepatocytes can be re-used for further experiments in Bionas 2500 analyzing system.

“Our study using primary human hepatocytes and Bionas 2500 analyzing system shows very promising results and could be ideally suited to predict hepatotoxic effects in vitro,” says Dr. Ralf Ehret, general manager of Bionas GmbH.

Predicting liver toxicity is a major concern of the pharmaceutical industry and non-immortalized primary human hepatocytes can be used as biosensors for the analysis of drugs, food additives and chemicals. A cell-based assay based on the Bionas 2500 analyzing system and primary hepatocytes may aid compound selection in the drug-discovery process and may reduce both the number of animal studies and preclinical development time.

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