Animal Models of Liver Diseases
Dr. Yury Popov is a founder and director of the translational Liver Fibrosis Core Lab, a one-of-a-kind facility in New England, which focuses on testing and validating the antifibrotic efficacy of novel drug candidates in our cutting-edge animal models of liver fibrosis. Since its establishment in 2010, dozens of small molecules and biologicals have been rigorously tested at the Liver Fibrosis Core Lab in partnership with Pharma and Biotech, with several selected agents advancing to clinical trials in Metabolic-associated Steatohepatitis, Primary Biliary Cholangitis, and Primary Sclerosis Cholangitis.
Through our Liver Fibrosis Core, we offer access to world-class expertise in pre-clinical drug testing using small animal models of chronic liver disease, and proprietary and non-proprietary animal models. We have several well established and routinely run mouse and rat models of liver fibrosis of metabolic, biliary and post-necrotic etiology readily available.
For more information please contact Yury Popov.
Precision Cut Liver Slices
Precision cut liver slice (PCLS) is an ex vivo tissue culture system that preserves human liver cells in a native tissue architecture. Leveraging the largest liver transplant program and the only academic Living Donor Procurement Center in New England, we have developed a robust program to generate PCLS from both healthy and diseased human livers from diverse conditions. Our team has refined every step of PCLS production from tissue procurement, precision slicing, tissue recovery, and culture with an OR-to-Incubator times < 2 hours. Furthermore, we have developed innovative methods for tissue quality assessment using whole tissue imaging (panel on the right) and phenotype characterization using histological, biochemical and omics approaches. Our PCLS technology enables stable PCLS cultures for up to 14 days to support drug testing in both healthy and diseased settings and supports the testing of GalNAc mediated drug delivery.
For more information please contact Z. Gordon Jiang to discuss how PCLS can help your research.
Liver Organoids
We have the unique ability to use tissues from organ donors, with the support of the newly created BIDMC/New England Donor Services (NEDS) hospital-based Donor Care and Recovery Center, in combination with differentiated stem cells, to create a multicellular 3D organoid. This allows us to obtain organoids that include all the cellular microenvironment and components that one can find in the real organ. This new concept will transform the way regenerative medicine and drug discovery are classically intended. Having multicellular 3D organoids that recapitulate at micro tissue level the organ, will allow us to study more precisely diseases that could not be defined until now because of the lack of similarities between the in vitro derived organoids and the real tissue. Moreover, having the ability to derive human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) directly from the patient’s tissue, will make our Center a source for personalized medicine, allowing for the discovery of more efficient therapeutic options.
For more information please contact Giuseppe Pettinato to discuss how multicellular organoids generation can help your research.