The metabolic activation and detoxification pathways of drug candidates is an important aspect of drug development. This information can be applied towards structural design to minimize toxicological liability of drug candidates, selection of animal species for preclinical evaluation of human toxicity, identification of at-risk populations based on metabolic activation and detoxification capacity and identification of environmental factors that may exacerbate drug toxicity via their induction of metabolic activating pathways and inhibition of detoxification pathways. An in vitro cytotoxicity assay can help enable this process.

In this webinar, the featured speaker will review the role of metabolic activation and detoxification in drug toxicity as well as to introduce a novel in vitro experimental system, the metabolism-dependent cytotoxicity assay (MDCA) for the evaluation of the roles of drug metabolizing enzymes in drug toxicity. MDCA utilizes the cofactor-supplemented permeabilized human hepatocytes (MetMax™ Human Hepatocytes, MMHH), as an exogenous hepatic metabolic system, with human embryonic kidney 293 (HEK293) cells, a cell line deficient in xenobiotic drug metabolizing enzyme activities, as target cells for the quantification of cytotoxicity. Results with model drug-induced liver injury (DILI) drugs suggest that glutathione (GSH) attenuation of cytotoxicity may be used to identify drugs metabolized to cytotoxic reactive metabolites, a hallmark of DILI drugs.

Register to learn about the novel in vitro experimental system MDCA and its role in the evaluation of cytotoxicity of drug candidates.