- Expected to be utilized for the development of the 3D organoid in the future.

A research team made of domestic researchers developed quantitative prediction algorithm to evaluate the differentiation level of human hepatocyte. It is expected that the development of well-differentiated liver organoid will be accelerated by evaluating the differentiation level of 3D liver organoid made from various human cells.

Korea Research Institute of Bioscience & Biotechnology (President Chang Kyu-tae, KRIBB) research team (corresponding authors: Cho Hyeon-soo/ Jeong Cho-rok/ Kim Nam-soon, lead authors: Kim Dae-woo/ Yoo Je-woon/ Sohn Mi-young) was supported by Big Issue Group (BIG) project of KRIBB and was published on the online version of Hepatology, IF 13.246 which is the world’s renowned journal in biology as of June 23.

Recently, researches on liver diseases and liver organoid to develop new drugs are being conducted actively. Liver is in charge of detoxification and target organs of toxicity. The development of technology to mimic liver organ is underway. In particular, liver is an important organ for metabolism such as detoxification, protein combination and storing nutrition. Malfunction of the liver could lead to hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and liver cancer and even to death.

Most of the medicines absorbed into the body are dissolved in the liver and liver can be damaged by the toxicity of the medicine. Therefore, liver is the most important organ for the test on the efficacy and toxicity of a new drug and Human Pluripotent Stem Cell (hPSC) and liver cell differentiation technology using various human cells have emerged as an alternative to produce liver organoid that mimics human liver.

Therefore, the development of liver organoid using 3D cultivation of human liver cells and liver organoid using pluripotent stem cell is expected to be a successful model for disease modeling and drug screening in the new drug development, pharmacology and toxicology industries.

As the area of using liver organoid has been expanded from disease mechanism research to new drug development, the need for the development of a new quantitative evaluation system and algorithm has emerged for the production and evaluation of high quality liver organoid.

So far, the differentiation and function of liver organoid have been evaluated quantitatively by testing liver specific protein expression or activation of enzyme to verify produced liver organoid. However, it Is hard to obtain quantitative outcome as the qualitative evaluation standard on liver organoid produced by different laboratories is different.

Accordingly, KRIBB research team established the liver organoid evaluation panel and algorithm by analyzing transcriptome of 20 human organs based on next generation sequencing (NGS) and it is expected that measuring and evaluating differentiation level of liver organoid quantitatively will be possible.

The KRIBB research team said “we developed the base technology that can measure the differentiation and maturity of organoid, which is studied actively recently as an alternative organ for in-vitro evaluation. The newly developed quantitative evaluation system will make it possible to evaluate differentiation of various organs and contribute significantly to the development of alternative organ for stem cell based treatment and drug screening.