Some 20 million people in the US alone suffer from liver disease, and more than 40 000 of them die every year. liver transplants could save many of these lives, but there are only enough donor livers to treat about 4,000 US patients each year. Now researchers have developed a way to grow liver cells in the laboratory by temporarily making them cancerous, then use them to reconstruct a damaged rat liver. The technique could one day help prolong the lives of patients waiting for a donor organ, or even eliminate the need for a transplant
When the liver suffers chronic damage -. Often hepatitis or too alcohol-- cells eventually stop division and member fails. So far it has been difficult to grow liver replacement cells in the laboratory. But in 1996, Philippe Leboulch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School have developed a technique of introducing a cancer oncogene called T antigen in cells, so "immortalizing" that they continually increase in culture. To keep the cells of cancer remain forever, he designed the oncogene so that it can be cut to the DNA of cells later by an adenovirus carrying a pair of "genetic scissors."
When Ira Fox, a surgeon liver transplantation at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, has heard of this system, he immediately called Leboulch and proposed a collaboration to a trial in liver cells. the new team set to see if they could grow enough cells to save the life of rats that had been about 0% of their livers surgically removed. This treatment is always fatal, but when the researchers injected their hepatocytes in the spleens of the animals up 60% of the animals survived, they report in February 18 Science .
the success is "very encouraging," says hepatologist Roy Chowdhury of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York . But he noted that the liver failure in humans is different; a virus or a toxin may persist, said Chowdhury, and perhaps damage the transplanted cells, too.
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