Visikol to Launch OpenLiver Initiative

Visikol has announced that at the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) conference, they will be launching a suite of open source liver 3D cell culture models through an effort called OpenLiver™. 

These models will leverage Biopredic’s HepaRG™ cells which for many research questions are more economical, convenient, and reproducible as compared with traditional primary human hepatocyte models. These cells will be used to generate the OpenLiver™ HepaRG™ Spheroid and the OpenLiver™ HepaRG™ NP 3D models which will be comprised of HepaRG™ cells only and HepaRG™ cells combined with a population of non-parenchymal cells, respectively. Visikol will use these models within its 3D cell culture assay services but will also open source them such that any research can easily replicate these models within their own lab. Visikol will provide the research community with the guidance, protocols, validation criteria, sourcing details and tutorials required to generate these models.

“Open source is incredibly important to us in developing these models as we want to build consensus in the research community and we also want to provide our pharmaceutical Clients with appropriate business continuity such that they can internalize our models if they so decide instead of being dependent upon a proprietary 3rd party model,” said Visikol chief executive officer Dr. Michael Johnson. 

The Visikol OpenLiver™ initiative will kick-off at SLAS with a talk from Dr. Erin Edwards which will detail how these models fit into the liver in vitro space. 

“As a company, we are model agnostic in that we only want to use a model that is required for a research question in order to minimize cost and thus find it very important to educate our customers on when to use complex primary human hepatocyte 3D cell culture models and when a simpler model such as the OpenLiver™ HepaRG™ Spheroid is appropriate,” said Visikol director of In Vitro Services Dr. Erin Edwards.