Drug-induced liver injury: the dawn of biomarkers?

Drug-induced liver injury: the dawn of biomarkers? F1000Prime Rep. 2015;7:34 Authors: Weiler S, Merz M, Kullak-Ublick GA Abstract Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a potentially fatal adverse event with significant medical and economic impact. Many drugs, especially anti-infective, neurologic or pain-modifying substances, act as hepatotoxins. With cardiovascular toxicity, liver toxicity is one of the two leading causes for drug withdrawal from the market. The liver can be affected directly, in a predictable and dose-dependent manner, or idiosyncratically, independent of the dose and therefore unpredictable. Currently DILI is a diagnosis of exclusion that physicians have to bear in mind in patients with an unexplained increase of liver enzymes. The type of injury is categorized into hepatocellular, cholestatic, or mixed by the respective enzyme pattern of injury. Symptoms of affected patients can mimic any other liver disease. Therefore, new diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for early liver injury are currently being evaluated in multi-centre clinical trials that are conducted by international consortia and other initiatives. Pharmacogenetic testing, next-generation sequencing, proteomics, metabolomics and mechanistic markers can help to preselect susceptible patient populations and tailor drug therapy to individual patients. Proposed DILI indicators that are under investigation include microRNAs, cytokeratin-18 (CK18), high mobi...
Source: F1000 Medicine Reports - Category: Biomedical Science Tags: F1000Prime Rep Source Type: research