Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a major health crisis with no approved therapeutics and many failures in the clinic. A vascularized patient-derived liver acinus microphysiology system (vLAMPS) is an innovative precision medicine platform for optimizing clinical trial design for NAFLD. We will test the response of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived liver cells from NAFLD patients in vLAMPS with either the high-risk variant PNPLA3 I148M or the wild-type to a range of drugs in development. The goal is to identify the right patient genotype for the right drug or drug combination.
Drs. D. Lansing Taylor (Drug Discovery Institute and Dept of Computational and Systems Biology), Alejandro Soto-Gutierrez (Dept of Pathology and McGowan Institute) and Jaideep Behari (Dept of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition and Director of the UPMC Fatty Liver, Obesity and Wellness Clinic) are Mulit-PIs on an NIH funded grant “ A vascularized patient-derived iPSC liver acinus microphysiology system as an innovative precision medicine platform for optimizing clinical trial design for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease