Modeling alcoholic liver disease in a human Liver-Chip

Abstract

Fatty liver disease (FLD), is a major public health burden that affects up to 30% of people in Western countries and leads to progressive liver injury, comorbidities, and increased mortality. Key risk factors for developing FLD are obesity and alcohol consumption, both of which are growing in prevalence worldwide. There is an urgent need for human-relevant preclinical models to improve our understanding of FLD progression to steatohepatitis and for the development of sensitive noninvasive diagnostics and therapies. Alcohol-induced liver disease (ALD) represents an ideal case for modeling FDL as ethanol exposure is a comparatively simpler trigger for experimental induction of the pathology, as opposed to the complexity of modeling the diet- and life-style induced FLD. Further, despite their different root causes, the two pathologies share several common characteristics in disease progression and deterioration of liver function, highlighting the potential of an ALD microphysiological model for broad application in translational research. Here, we leverage our recently reported human Liver-Chip for toxicity applications, to expand the capabilities of the platform for broad application in translational research. We report the first in vitro modeling of ALD that uses human relevant blood alcohol concentrations (BAC) and affords multimodal profiling of clinically relevant endpoints. Our ALD Liver-Chip recapitulates established FLD markers in response to ethanol in a concentration-dependent manner, including lipid accumulation and oxidative stress. Importantly, we show that the ALD Liver-Chip supports the study of secondary insults common in patients with advanced ALD, such as high blood endotoxin levels due to alcohol-associated increased intestinal permeability and barrier dysfunction. Moreover, owing to new developments in the design, the ALD Liver-Chip enables the measurement of structural changes of the bile canaliculi (BC) network as a novel in vitro quantitative readout of alcoholic liver toxicity. In summary, we report the development of a human ALD Liver-Chip as a new platform for modeling the progression of alcohol-induced liver injury with direct translation to clinical research.