Organ Specific Toxicity

Minimizing toxicity remains one of the major barriers to bringing a drug to market and keeping it on the market. Almost 10% of drugs have been withdrawn from the clinical market worldwide in the past 40 years due to cardiovascular safety concerns. In addition, neurotoxicity represents a frequent and dangerous side-effect, making the central and peripheral nervous systems important targets of toxicological studies. Furthermore, the crucial roles of the liver in drug metabolism, and the kidney in drug excretion, make them the major organs involved in evoking drug-related toxic responses. Therefore, these organs are important targets of toxicological studies. Common diseases arising from drug-induced liver toxicity are cholestasis, steatosis, phospholipidosis, non-genotoxic hepatocarcinogenicity, and necrosis. Pathophysiological effects from cardiotoxicity or neurotoxicity are typically not discovered without costly chronic experimental studies, highlighting the critical need for new methods that allow rapid results and early detection. Biomarkers are a potential solution for these challenging clinical needs.

QIAGEN provides a broad range of assay technologies for organ specific toxicity research that enables analysis of gene expression and regulation, epigenetic modification, genotyping, and signal transduction pathway activation. Solutions optimized for organ specific toxicity studies include PCR array, miRNA, siRNA, mutation analysis, pathway reporter, chromatin IP, DNA methylation, and protein expression products.