ANIMAL MAGIC

How animals are changing medical treatments

THIS week: Pig cells for damaged livers PIG tissue is used far more than any other animal tissue in medicine, as pigs are easy to breed and genetically similar to humans, so the tissue is unlikely to be rejected.

Now, scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, in the U.S., have developed a bioartificial liver — a man-made liver containing pig liver cells (hepatocytes) — that takes over the work of the patient’s own liver while they recover from surgery or injury. Doctors connect the external device to the body via a blood vessel in the abdomen. As blood passes through a chamber seeded with thousands of pig hepatocytes, the cells filter out waste, as a healthy human liver would. The bioartificial liver can be used for around 30 days, before the pig cells start to die.