Discussing the Path to a Tissue Engineered Liver

An interesting interview with a tissue engineer can be found at the Methuselah Foundation blog. It covers one view of the path from today's research to the clinical availability of complete engineered livers constructed to order, among other subjects: [The most significant challenge] definitely has to do with scaling up our cell sources, because the liver is such a large organ, and you just need an enormous volume of cells. We can take fat-derived bone marrow stem cells and turn them into pretty much any cell that we want, but we need such large quantities that we may have to combine cells from different populations in order to get enough. [So] we're going back to how we tackled it for the small bowel, which was to use clusters of cells known as organoid units rather than single cells alone. For the bowel, what that cluster looks like is an epithelial cell - the specialized stem cell of the intestine - with a little ball of cells gathered around it. One of the beauties of these organoid units is that because all of the cells are together, they've already got their natural architecture in place. When you're working with single cells, they have the unfortunate habit of changing into other cells that you don't want. And the more you can keep them together, the happier they are. So these already existing cell architectures turned out to be very useful to us. Likewise, with the liver, rather than using single cells alone and therefore having to figure out how to mass produce t...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs