Chimeric mouse with humanized liver, an emerging tool for the drug development

Abstract

Chimeric mouse with humanized liver is an experimental animal which is produced by transplanting normal human hepatocytes into a host mouse having both of immunodeficient and liver-injured characters. PXB-mouse®, which is developed and supplied by PhoenixBio group, is produced by utilizing cDNA-uPA/SCID mouse as a host animal and has a humanized liver containing over 70% of human hepatocytes. It has been utilized in the research fields of drug metabolism such as investigation of human-specific metabolites and pharmacokinetics, prediction of human DILI and development of anti-viral hepatitis drugs. Furthermore, it is expected that PXB-mouse will be valuable for the development of drugs of new modalities as the emerging technologies such as oligonucleotide medicine and gene therapy. Because it has an organ which consists almost entirely of human cells PXB-mouse is expected to be used in validation of efficacy or prediction of off-target effect caused by human specific nucleotide sequence. This paper introduces the character of PXB-mouse focusing on the successful achievements in these research fields.