BOSTON – Dr Sangeeta Bhatia, professor of health sciences and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has come up with a breakthrough in the field of liver disease treatment, as reported by Kounteya Sinha of TNN.
For the first time in history, a scientist has been successful in keeping liver cells functional outside the body, supported by certain chemicals which help to maintain the normal functioning of the cells along with production of new tissue.
Liver is one such organ in the human body which regenerates on its own, when a certain portion is removed. But, there were many obstacles in producing artificial liver tissue for transplantation. Hepatocytes (mature liver cells) cannot function normally for a long period of time, once they are removed from the body.
‘’It’s a paradox because we know liver cells are capable of growing, but somehow we can’t get them to grow outside the body,” says Bhatia.
Speaking to TOI, Dr Bhatia said “The main finding is that we identified chemicals that make liver cells grow outside the body. Cells grown this way can be incorporated into engineered livers that we are building to treat patients with liver disease. The human liver cells (hepatocytes) can also be used for drug testing to improve drug safety”.
“We have showed that human liver cells could be used to build engineered liver tissue and that this liver tissue could function once implanted in the body. So far, we are able to do this in mice. We need to make them bigger in order to help patients with liver disease.”
She added “Tissue engineering has already created artificial skin and cartilage and bone that has helped many millions. Artificial trachea and bladder and blood vessels are also in humans. We will follow the same path that others have laid out for us for the liver”.
“The main challenges are to get the liver cells to function like liver cells so they can support the patient, getting enough liver cells for a patient (billions are needed), and ways to implant them so they have enough nutrients through blood vessels (this is called vascularization). We think we have made good progress on the functional side begins to address the cell sourcing and vascularization issues,” she added, reports Sinha.
Temporary maintenance of the functioning of normal liver cells (after they are removed from the body) will be made possible as a result of the research done by Bhatia.
