Healthy primary sandwich-cultured hepatocytes form functional bile canaliculi expressing a full complement of efflux and uptake transporters. B-CLEAR technology utilizes a patented process to modulate the integrity of tight junctions at the interface of the canaliculi and the culture medium, releasing the contents and allowing measurement of biliary excretion and efflux. The services offered by SOLVO Biotechnology utilizing B-CLEAR technology will allow the determination of biliary clearance, in addition to hepatic transporter-mediated drug-drug interactions, using rat, dog or human hepatocytes. Recently, SOLVO has improved the B-Clear assay minimizing the experimental setup to 48-well plates, requiring significantly less hepatocytes compared to the previous 24-well setup, reducing cost and improving assay throughput.
SOLVO has also developed the vectorial efflux assay as an improvement to the “traditional” B-Clear assay. In this system, the uptake and efflux processes are measured separately, enabling assessment of the uptake, as well as basolateral and biliary efflux of compounds at once, in a single experiment, in addition to biliary clearance evaluation. The Vectorial Transport assay was set up and validated for human and rat SCH.