In vitro assay of cytotoxicity with cultured liver: accomplishments and possibilities.

Tissue cultures offer potential advantages for assaying the toxicity of chemicals and for evaluating tissue susceptibility to toxic agents. Several properties of cultured cells hinder the immediate, widespread use of tissue cultures to assay toxicity routinely. These points are illustrated by briefly reviewing attempts to utilize different types of hepatic cultures to evaluate the actions of carcinogenic chemicals in vitro. Hepatocytes in vivo apparently can metabolize all known procarcinogenic chemicals, but the process of tissue isolation and the environmental conditions in vitro may modify drastically the responses of hepatocytes and other cultured hepatic cells to toxic chemicals. Before cell cultures can be used routinely as the basis of screening systems to detect chemical toxins, specificity and sensitivity of response to chemicals representing all chemical classes must be validated by laboratory studies.