Tracking antibiotics in liver cell membranes can predict toxicity, IIT Bombay researchers find

Mumbai, Feb 28 (PTI) Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have found that analysing where antibiotics accumulate within the outer layers of liver cells can serve as an early indicator of drug-induced toxicity, which can help in faster detection of harmful side effects.

Antibiotics are among modern medicine's greatest successes. But doctors have long noticed that certain drugs raise liver enzymes or cause inflammation, and in rare cases, the damage can be severe, leading to liver failure.

A new study by researchers at IIT Bombay, led by Prof Ashutosh Kumar from the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering along with Prof Vetriselvan Subramaniyan from Sunway University, Malaysia, showed that the answer may lie not in how strongly a drug acts, but in where and how it interacts with the outer layer (membrane) of liver cells.

"Traditionally, people believed that a drug molecule's harm to cells comes from how much it ruptures the cell membrane. Our results can change that view," Prof Kumar said adding that this insight has important implications for newer and safer classes of drug development.

By studying how drugs engage with cell membranes at a molecular level, scientists will be able to predict toxicity risks before clinical trials begin.

The study further revealed that drug-induced liver injury is a major concern in medicine and is one of the main reasons medicines are withdrawn from the market or restricted after approval.

The challenge is that liver injury is hard to predict as many patients show no symptoms at first, while others are on multiple medications, making it challenging to identify the real culprit, it stated.

Even closely related drugs can behave very differently.

"The cell membrane is the first point of contact between a drug and liver cells. Any drug circulating in the blood must interact with the cell membrane before entering the cell or affecting cellular targets," says Akash Kumar Jha, first author of the paper.

This led the researchers to believe that early toxic effects often begin at the membrane level, which also hosts many proteins responsible for transport, signalling, and metabolism.

The findings suggest a new way to predict drug safety by detecting toxicity risks early in the drug development process by tracking how medicines interact with cell membranes in the lab.

"By applying this membrane-focused approach, we may uncover why some treatments cause unexpected side effects and use that knowledge to design gentler compounds that are less toxic. Because these tests are relatively fast and scalable, they could be added to standard safety checks during drug development, helping researchers avoid costly failures later and accelerating the path toward safer medicines," added Jha. PTI SM KRK