Archive | 2019
Toksikolojide İn Vitro Karaciğer Modelleri
Abstract
Liver is the organ where the basic metabolic functions of the organism is actualized. Several chemicals are known to be hepatotoxic. The capacity of a chemical to cause liver damage depends on a series of complex biological processes during its uptake, biotransformation and elimination. In addition, for several liver damaging chemicals, the extrapolation of information obtained from animal models to humans is not appropriate in some situations. Under these circumstances, in vitro liver systems provide a better experimental approach for determining the hepatotoxic substances and their mechanism/s of hepatotoxicity. The most widely used in vitro liver models are isolated perfused organ parts, liver slices, subcellular fractions and isolated and cultured hepatocytes. In the last twenty and thirty years, the preparation and culturing of the differentiated hepatocytes and liver slices obtained from animals and humans have intensively developed. Moreover, important research on the advantages of the use of isolated hepatocytes in drug metabolism and toxicity studies have been performed. However, in vitro studies are not still an alternative to in vivo studies, particularly in the field of drug development. In addition, the phenotypic changes observed in cultured hepatocytes, their proliferation capacity and the difficulty in finding human hepatocytes are still the limitations. In the future, the highly expected development is the recruitment of culture conditions for these models to highly mimic in vitro conditions and provide high correlations. In this review, I will mainly focus on in vitro liver models used in toxicology, their utilixation, advantages and disadvantages.