Ochre Bio, a biotech company developing RNA medicines for chronic liver diseases, announced today the launch of its ‘Liver ICU’. Housed in BioLabs@NYULangone, a biopharma incubator in New York City, this research site will evaluate the efficacy of new RNA therapeutics on whole human livers maintained on machines. The use of discarded donor livers for research is expected to enhance the timeliness and accuracy of liver medicine research by testing interventions directly in human livers maintained under conditions mimicking human physiology.
This site is a part of a network of three leading liver perfusion research sites across the US. The other two US research sites are the laboratory of Greg Tietjen, PhD at Yale University, a pioneer in the field of ex vivo organ research, and LifeShare of Oklahoma, a leading US organ procurement organisation. In addition, Ochre Bio is also announcing a partnership with OrganOx, a company at the forefront of changing the way donor livers are preserved in the critical time between donation and transplantation, and one of the first companies to have a liver perfusion device approved by the FDA.
This research will involve hundreds of donor livers being kept alive outside the body for multiple days each. These are donor livers that cannot be used for transplant patients for various reasons, and so would be otherwise discarded. The livers will be maintained in human physiological conditions and used to test therapeutic interventions, with the goal of finding new therapies to improve liver transplant outcomes, in the hope of thereby increasing the supply of transplantable livers, as well as uncovering insights relevant to a wider set of liver diseases. The partners will work with the Ochre Bio research team towards being able to consistently perfuse organs for several days to study the effects of RNA therapy on liver performance.
“We’re excited to announce this new research site in the US, as well as these partnerships with world leaders in liver perfusion research and transplant medicine,” said Jack O’Meara, CEO and co-founder at Ochre Bio. “This collaboration to evaluate the effects of RNA therapy directly in human livers preclinically is a step change for liver research, that we hope will lead to treatments for a number of liver diseases, and one day reduce the burden of liver transplantation for patients.”
"Our core philosophy, as a data-led genomics company, is that the best research is human research. Deep phenotyping of how human livers respond to therapies as an alternative to animal models is a huge advancement for this field of science," said Dr Quin Wills PhD, CSO & Co-Founder at Ochre Bio. “It’s like running clinical trials where we can directly study the organ we’re treating. We’re excited to lead the field and partner with these outstanding organisations to advance our understanding of liver biology.”