Doctors Create Human Liver From Scratch- After 5 Years Of Trials.
Human liver in a dish!
Liver, not removed from any person; but created from scratch.
Dr. Alejandro Soto-Gutiérrez, Pittsburgh Liver Research Center, said that It is not like ‘wahoo’ & the next morning you think, ‘ah, I am going to make a human liver.’
It took almost 5 years of trial and error to create this. But using stem cells, genetics and organ cultures, tissue engineering, and a team of researchers & experts in these areas, the scientists have come up with this.
Alexandra Collins, Ph.D., of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine explains the process of creating a human liver.
Rat liver gets stripped of its own cells so that just the connective tissue of it remains.
And from a small piece of human
skin, the researchers pluck out stem cells & coax them into becoming human liver cells; the cells are collected.They are then injected into the chamber- called a bioreactor- where they take up residence in the empty liver of the rat.
This entire process i.e, from gathering the cells to make a liver to get to that particular point -where you have an actual mini-human liver in a bioreactor- takes several months.
This system will stay alive or say viable, for only a few days.
But in that very short time, the scientists can try different drugs to treat the diseased liver.
Dr. Collin said it is possible to test any sort of therapeutic by simply injecting this chemical through the system.
Before this system, animal livers were playing a role in this kind of research studies but human livers did not always respond in the same way.
With the development of this new system, the cells have had genetic modifications to recreate diseases like the fatty liver, a growing problem in the US.
This new technology has the potential for personalized medicines. From your skin cell, they could grow your own mini-liver to figure out which medicines would work for an individual.
Dr. Soto said that he believes it is a very good biological tool to screen treatments that aren’t otherwise being tested in humans themselves because it is dangerous.
As it is designed, it would be a long stretch to create livers for transplantation.
We are very far away from making an actual liver. We’re probably many years away. But this is a good step, Dr. Soto added.
Editor’s Note: Doctors Create Human Liver From Scratch- After 5 Years Of Trials. stem cells. genetics and organ cultures. tissue engineering. gene therapy.
