Livers grown in lab offer treatment hope
Hub bio-engineers have created an expandable liver the size of a contact lens that they hope will help patients with deadly diseases such as cirrhosis and hepatitis, according to a new study.
“In the field of tissue engineering, one of the big challenges is trying to build something the size of a liver, because it’s hard to keep the cells alive,” said Dr. Christopher Chen, a Boston University professor in biomedical engineering and author on the study.
“This means we could make something smaller that could then grow over time,” Chen said.
Chen and his colleagues constructed miniature livers out of human liver cells and fibrin, the clotting material in our blood, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The cells were then organized using 3-D printing. In two months’ time, the organs grew up to 50 times their original size after being implanted in mice.
Some 7,000 people are currently waiting for liver transplants in the U.S. Scientists have been trying for several years to help ease the national shortage with lab-grown organs.
But for something as large as a liver — which compares in size to a small football or two fists — it is difficult to provide enough of a blood supply to keep such a large cluster of cells alive.
And although this method is far from clinical use, Chen said the study is promising.
“The main purpose was just to ask whether you can implant something small and it would grow to meet the demands of the organism,” Chen said. “The implication would be you might not have to implant a whole liver.”
Livers have the ability to regenerate in a way other organs do not, which is one of the reasons these organs hold promise. When the body senses liver damage, the body sends signals to that area to create more cells.
But there is still much research to be done before the method’s viability is proven. It is still unclear whether it can grow to the size of a human liver.
And researchers aim to add more features to it, like bile ducts, said co-author Sangeeta Bhatia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of health sciences and technology and electrical engineering.
And eventually, Bhatia said, they would like to “make them ‘smarter’ by embedding sensors in them to tell us how they are doing.”
“It really resembles the architecture of the liver,” Bhatia said. “Biology is a master engineer and architect.”