In mice, Skoltech identifies candidate liver-injury markers

A mass spectrometer has given a Russian research team a new set of clues about damaged livers. Scientists at Skoltech and the N.N. Petrov National Medical Research Center of Oncology identified candidate protein markers of direct toxic liver injury in mice, alongside evidence that plant polyphenols can protect the animals' livers.

The team used a mass spectrometry-based multi-omics approach — combining several large-scale molecular analyses — to pinpoint proteins directly in liver tissue. Rather than describing the damage alone, these markers show how the body's defense mechanisms behave, which could help researchers follow both disease progression and the response to treatment.

The same study tested plant polyphenol-based drugs in an animal model of direct toxic liver injury, or DTLI. The mice's survival rates increased, and tissue examinations confirmed protective effects. The researchers also reported that the polyphenols they studied were neither toxic nor mutagenic, then used ultra-high-resolution ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry to characterize the drugs' complex molecular mixtures and isolate their most active fraction.

What changes in practice? If later validation succeeds, the candidate proteins could underpin minimally invasive blood or plasma tests for screening and monitoring liver problems. Doctors and clinical-trial teams could potentially track treatment effectiveness without repeated invasive biopsies. That possibility remains a research direction, not a service available to patients: the reported results come from mice and laboratory models, and the human test has yet to be developed and validated.

The findings build on earlier work in a carbon tetrachloride-induced subclinical liver failure model and are being pursued by Skoltech's Laboratory of Omics Technologies and Big Data for Personalized Medicine and Health, led by Professor Evgeny Nikolaev. Alexander Brzhozovskiy, the study's first author, said the researchers had followed the compounds from molecular characterization and safety assessment to testing their protective effects in two different in vitro models. The study was published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.