A New Approach To Liver Transplantation In Rats Is Making Progress

A New Approach To Liver Transplantation In Rats Is Making Progress.
A unfledged come nigh to liver transplantation is making headway in beginning work with rats, researchers say. Their work at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH-CEM) could at the end of the day point the way toward engineering fresh, functioning and transplantable liver organs out of discarded liver material, the researchers suggest. The research, reported online June 13 in Nature Medicine, is just at the "proof-of-concept" stage, but the crew believes it has successfully fashioned a laboratory process to liberate stripped down structural liver tissue and essentially "reseed" it with newly introduced liver cells.

The ovule cells are then coaxed to adhere to the host scaffolding, so that they flower and eventually re-establish the organ's complex vascular network. Although the highly complex competence is still far from the point at which it might be applicable to humans, the prospect is hopeful news for the liver transplant community. Because of a extreme shortage of donor organs, about 4000 Americans are deprived of potentially life-saving liver transplants each year.