Researchers Successfully Rehab Used Livers into Healthy Organs, and Transplant Them

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a method to rebuilding functional livers from rats using cell cultures to revitalize the original liver.  The livers are washed with a mild detergent that gently strips away the liver cells, leaving the a scaffold of the original proteins and extracellular architecture intact.

Then, seeding the scaffold with cells from healthy livers and special endothelial cells to line the blood vessels, the scaffold is repopulated with healthy cells and cultured for 10 days.  Some two-day-old livers generated from this method were transplanted back into rats, and they continued to thrive for 8 hours while connected to the rat’s vascular system.  However, the livers cannot function over a current 24-hour maximum. 

The main problem to be overcome in future research is that the repopulation of blood vessels is not dense enough.  Currently, the hope is to have a fully functioning liver for rats via this method within two years.  In addition, researchers believe that stem cell research may hold the key to further enhancing this process by creating healthy, donor-specific liver cells, creating the perfect transplant for patients.

I found this article to be interesting because liver failure is the 12^th-leading cause of death in the United States and the concept of using bioscaffolds is particularly interesting to me.  The idea of using the body’s own processes in combination with modern man-made techniques to overcome pathological conditions represents a strange harmony of man and nature that I find fascinating.  Before this class I always imagined man creating everything from the bottom-up, but this class in particular has shown me that the body’s systems are far more complicated than we can fully replicate, and that nature itself is the better man when it comes to restoring health.  This article just demonstrates to me the incredible ability of the body to restore systems under conditions simulated by man.

Source:

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-06/washing-out-old-cells-and-adding-new-ones-researchers-make-old-livers-new-again