Bile is a digestive liquid that is made in the liver. It travels through the bile ducts to the small intestine, where it helps digest fats. Biliary atresia is a disease of the bile ducts that unfortunately affects only infants and whose symptoms appear or develop about two to eight weeks after birth.
In this disease, the bile ducts become inflamed and blocked soon after birth. This causes bile to remain in the liver, where it starts to destroy liver cells rapidly and cause cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver, often necessitating a liver transplant.
Now, in a recent study by scientists at the University of Cambridge, a new method for growing and transplanting artificial bile ducts that could in future be used to help treat liver disease in children, reducing the need for liver transplantation has been identified.
The paper published in Nature Medicine, reveals how primitive bile ducts grown in the lab can regenerate bile ducts when transplanted into mice. The animals, which suffered from bile duct damage, survived without complications after the transplant.
The study suggests that it will be feasible to generate and transplant artificial human bile ducts using a combination of cell transplantation and tissue engineering
technology. And hence provides hope for the future treatment of diseases of the bile duct; at present, the only option is a liver transplant.Furthermore, the scientists have shown that they could use biodegradable polymers as scaffolds for the biliary cells to grow in. The material could also be turned into tubes to replicate the structure of bile ducts and grafted to replace a diseased duct.
“Our work has the potential to transform the treatment of bile duct disorders. At the moment, our only option is liver transplantation, so we are limited by the availability of healthy organs for transplantation. In future, we believe it will be possible to generate large quantities of bioengineered tissue that could replace diseased bile ducts and provide a powerful new therapeutic option without this reliance on organ transplants. This demonstrates the power of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. These artificial bile ducts will not only be useful for transplanting, but could also be used to model other diseases of the bile duct and potentially develop and test new drug treatments.” Say the lead researchers of the study, Professor Ludovic Vallier and Dr Fotios Sampaziotis from the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and Dr Kourosh Saeb-Parsy from the Department of Surgery.
