Drug-Induced Liver Injury Is a Major Risk for New Drugs

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 458-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard B. Seeff

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI), a relatively rare condition, is nevertheless a major reason for not approving a drug in development or for removing one already marketed. With a specific diagnostic biomarker lacking, finding elevated serum enzyme [alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase and alkaline phosphatase] activities remains an initial signal for incipient liver injury. Enzyme elevations alone may not be harmful, but if caused by a drug and followed by jaundice (called ‘Hy's law') there is a high possibility of serious DILI. In 1997 several drugs were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the USA that were later withdrawn from the market for serious liver toxicity. New drugs in development are now required to be monitored for liver injury, and the data is to be considered in the approval decision. A program called e-DISH (evaluation of drug-induced serious hepatotoxicity) was introduced in 2004 to aid medical reviewers to select from all subjects studied those few who show nontrivial liver injury and estimate the most likely cause. The threshold of enzyme elevation comprising a warning for possibly serious DILI is uncertain, although generally accepted as 3-5 times the ‘upper limit of normal'. The new direct-acting antiviral agents for treating chronic hepatitis C virus, which often lead to a reduction of elevated ALTs, mandate that a later increase without viral breakthrough be compared to the new on-treatment level of values. The drug may be discontinued or interrupted for evaluation to exclude other possible causes of liver injury. The FDA has approved no drug since 1997 that has been withdrawn later because of serious hepatotoxicity.

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (02) ◽  
pp. 60-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianca Ueberberg ◽  
Ulrich Frommberger ◽  
Thomas Messer ◽  
Peter Zwanzger ◽  
Jens Kuhn ◽  
...  

Abstract Introduction Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is the 4th most common cause of liver damage in Western countries and can be caused by antidepressants. Methods Against the background of increasing antidepressant prescriptions and increasing use of polypharmacy, we analyzed administered antidepressants and other pharmacological substances, liver toxicity, comorbid somatic secondary diseases together with the occurrence of DILI in a patient population of 6 centers throughout Germany. Results The majority of the enrolled 329 patients received polypharmacological treatment in an inpatient setting. During antidepressant treatment 5.1% of the patients had elevated serum transaminase levels, whereby exactly and not more than 1 criterion proposed to be indicative for DILI, was fulfilled by 3 patients (0.9%). Discussion During patient characterization it becomes clear that a sensitization for relevant risk constellations causing liver injury in MDD patients is relevant to prevent further serious adverse events.


Author(s):  
Robert Ancuceanu ◽  
Marilena Viorica Hovanet ◽  
Adriana Iuliana Anghel ◽  
Florentina Furtunescu ◽  
Monica Neagu ◽  
...  

Drug induced liver injury (DILI) remains one of the challenges in the safety profile of both authorized drugs and candidate drugs and predicting hepatotoxicity from the chemical structure of a substance remains a challenge worth pursuing, being also coherent with the current tendency for replacing non-clinical tests with in vitro or in silico alternatives. In 2016 a group of researchers from FDA published an improved annotated list of drugs with respect to their DILI risk, constituting “the largest reference drug list ranked by the risk for developing drug-induced liver injury in humans”, DILIrank. This paper is one of the few attempting to predict liver toxicity using the DILIrank dataset. Molecular descriptors were computed with the Dragon 7.0 software, and a variety of feature selection and machine learning algorithms were implemented in the R computing environment. Nested (double) cross-validation was used to externally validate the models selected. A number of 78 models with reasonable performance have been selected and stacked through several approaches, including the building of multiple meta-models. The performance of the stacked models was slightly superior to other models published. The models were applied in a virtual screening exercise on over 100,000 compounds from the ZINC database and about 20% of them were predicted to be non-hepatotoxic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 2114
Author(s):  
Robert Ancuceanu ◽  
Marilena Viorica Hovanet ◽  
Adriana Iuliana Anghel ◽  
Florentina Furtunescu ◽  
Monica Neagu ◽  
...  

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) remains one of the challenges in the safety profile of both authorized and candidate drugs, and predicting hepatotoxicity from the chemical structure of a substance remains a task worth pursuing. Such an approach is coherent with the current tendency for replacing non-clinical tests with in vitro or in silico alternatives. In 2016, a group of researchers from the FDA published an improved annotated list of drugs with respect to their DILI risk, constituting “the largest reference drug list ranked by the risk for developing drug-induced liver injury in humans” (DILIrank). This paper is one of the few attempting to predict liver toxicity using the DILIrank dataset. Molecular descriptors were computed with the Dragon 7.0 software, and a variety of feature selection and machine learning algorithms were implemented in the R computing environment. Nested (double) cross-validation was used to externally validate the models selected. A total of 78 models with reasonable performance were selected and stacked through several approaches, including the building of multiple meta-models. The performance of the stacked models was slightly superior to other models published. The models were applied in a virtual screening exercise on over 100,000 compounds from the ZINC database and about 20% of them were predicted to be non-hepatotoxic.


Author(s):  
Morris Sherman

AbstractSince the early trials in viral hepatitis, more and more new drugs are being tested for use in various liver diseases. Since drug hepatotoxicity is a major cause of drugs under investigation not making it to market, the assessment of drug-induced liver injury in clinical trials of new drugs is crucial. This review will focus on the systems that are used to assess drug-induced liver injury in clinical trials and will discuss how some of these criteria are inappropriate or inaccurate in this function together with suggestions for improvement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenhui Liu ◽  
Xiangchang Zeng ◽  
Yating Liu ◽  
Jinfeng Liu ◽  
Chaopeng Li ◽  
...  

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) has become one of the major challenges of drug safety all over the word. So far, about 1,100 commonly used drugs including the medications used regularly, herbal and/or dietary supplements, have been reported to induce liver injury. Moreover, DILI is the main cause of the interruption of new drugs development and drugs withdrawn from the pharmaceutical market. Acute DILI may evolve into chronic DILI or even worse, commonly lead to life-threatening acute liver failure in Western countries. It is generally considered to have a close relationship to genetic factors, environmental risk factors, and host immunity, through the drug itself or its metabolites, leading to a series of cellular events, such as haptenization and immune response activation. Despite many researches on DILI, the specific biomarkers about it are not applicable to clinical diagnosis, which still relies on the exclusion of other causes of liver disease in clinical practice as before. Additionally, circumstantial evidence has suggested that DILI is mediated by the immune system. Here, we review the underlying mechanisms of the immune response to DILI and provide guidance for the future development of biomarkers for the early detection, prediction, and diagnosis of DILI.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (14) ◽  
pp. 1947-1949 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica A Muñoz ◽  
Corrinne G Kulick ◽  
Cindy M Kortepeter ◽  
Robert L Levin ◽  
Mark I Avigan

Background: In pre-approval trials, there was an increased incidence of mild, transient elevations of liver aminotransferases in study subjects treated with dimethyl fumarate (DMF). Objective/methods: To evaluate post-marketing cases of drug-induced liver injury associated with DMF. Results: We identified 14 post-marketing cases of clinically significant liver injury. Findings included newly elevated serum liver aminotransferase and bilirubin levels that developed as early as a few days after the first dose of DMF. The pattern of liver injury was primarily hepatocellular. No cases resulted in liver failure. Conclusion: Health professionals should be alerted to possible serious liver injury in patients receiving DMF.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 220-223
Author(s):  
Anuj K.C. ◽  
S. Jha ◽  
S. Thapa

Drug induced liver injury (DILI) is one of the common cause of liver toxicity. Most of the drugs used today are hepatotoxic. DILI accounts for approximately one-half of the cases of acute liver failure and mimics all forms of acute and chronic liver disease. It is the single most common adverse drug reaction leading to a halt in the development of new medication by pharmaceutical company, failure of new drug to obtain regulatory approval, and withdrawal or restriction of existing drug from the market. The aim of this study is to evaluate common causes and patterns of DILI in our setting. Twenty-seven patients were enrolled in the study. Ant tubercular drugs were most common cause of DILI, accounting for 48.2%. Other common causes of DILI were paracetamol (14.8%) and NSAID’s (11.1%). The most common pattern of liver injury seen was mixed pattern which was present in63%, followed by cholestatic and hepatocellular pattern. Hence, we should be very careful while prescribing these frequently used drugs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-81
Author(s):  
V. B. Larionova ◽  
A. V. Snegovoy

Background. In modern oncohematology achieved notable success due to the intensification and development of new chemotherapy regimens. However, the side effects of anticancer drugs, due to low selectivity of most of them, are a serious limitation to achieve their maximal therapeutic effect. Although doctors are aware of the possibility of hepatotoxic reactions to various drugs, in clinical practice, the diagnosis of drug-induced liver injury is formulated unreasonably rarely. This speculation is due to several factors: in some cases, the latent course of drug-induced liver injury, often inadequate interpretation of clinical symptoms and laboratory parameters, and sometimes insufficiently thorough collection of anamnesis. A particularly difficult problem for a doctor is the development of drug-induced hepatotoxicity in patients for whom the “causal” drug is prescribed for vital indications, in particular, polychemotherapy in cancer patients, complex antimicrobial therapy and antiviral therapy for febrile neutropenia or sepsis, etc. In these situations, on the one hand, treatment cancellation is impossible due to the risk of disease progression, on the other hand, its continuation is undesirable due to the risk of severe hepatitis. In addition, multicomponent therapy, which is a complex of potentially hepatotoxic substances, often does not allow specifying the substance that caused the pathological reaction. At the same time, it is obvious that the hepatocyte, the main cell of the hepatic parenchyma, remains the center of the organ pathology. The variety of biochemical processes occurring with ademetionine participation served as the basis for conducting clinical studies in order to correct drug-induced liver toxicity in the treatment of patients with blood system tumors.The objective of the study is to assess laboratory and clinical parameters of drug-induced liver injury (DILI), intrahepatic cholestasis in the study of homeostasis disorders in patients with hematological malignancies and chemotherapy-induced hepatotoxicity.Materials and methods. The study involved 45 patients with blood system tumors, who had chemotherapy-induced hepatocellular failure. To describe the population of DILI patients, we collected demographic data, clarified the underlying liver disease in each patient, and analyzed the diagnostic criteria for chronic liver disease due to DILI. Clinical signs and symptoms of cholestasis (jaundice, pruritus, weakness), as well as manifestations of a depressive state and asthenic syndrome – mood (mild, moderate and severe), normalization of sleep rhythm, memory improvement, general health were assessed. Changes in laboratory parameters of liver function were studied. In 20 patients with blood system tumors, the biochemical parameters associated with cell metabolism were analyzed – lipid peroxidation, nitric oxide (NOx ) level, impaired liver detoxification capacity by glutathione level and glutathione-S-transferase activity. The treatment regimens for drug-induced hepatotoxicity included the Heptral, which was prescribed until stable normalization of liver function.Results. All patients with developed liver failure showed metabolic disorders. The use of ademetionine has shown significant effect. The NO and superoxide dismutase in most patients decreased significantly and almost corresponded to the norm. Normalization of the glutathione system parameters was also observed. One of the mechanisms of Heptral protective effect is an increase in the glutathione synthesis. The improvement in laboratory parameters was accompanied by the disappearance of DILI and intrahepatic cholestasis symptoms. This is confirmed by significant statistical correlations between them and indicates the ademetionine efficacy to recovery of hepatocytes function. When using ademetionine, the most pronounced reduction among biochemical parameters was observed in alkaline phosphatase and γ-glutamyl transpeptidase, markers of cholestasis syndrome. In addition, serum bilirubin concentration and alanine and aspartic transaminases activity (albeit to a lesser extent) decreased significantly. Clinical and biochemical effects, as a rule, persisted for several months after completion of therapy. Decrease in biochemical parameters characterizing cholestasis and cytolysis (positive dynamics of alanine and aspartic transaminases, alkaline phosphatase, γ-glutamyl transpeptidase, bilirubin) was accompanied by an improvement and normalization of patients’ well-being. When assessing the depression and asthenic syndrome, it was noted that the duration of Heptral therapy is important.Conclusion. The results obtained were the basis for the development of supportive therapy programs to prevent and reduce liver toxicity during chemotherapy. Rational approaches to the liver metabolic disorders correction – a real way to increase the treatment efficacy and improve the quality of life of patients with blood system tumors.


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