Human Liver Tissue Grown From Stem Cells

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Stem Cell Research Also Included In: Transplants / Organ Donations;Biology / Biochemistry Article Date: 05 Jul 2013 - 0:00 PDT

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In a 3 July online issue of Nature, Takanori Takebe of the Yokohama City University (YCU) Graduate School of Medicine and colleagues, write:

"To our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating the generation of a functional human organ from pluripotent stem cells."

To achieve the feat, the team first grew tiny "liver buds" from a type of human stem cells (hiPSCs) in a culture, then transplanted them into live mice. The cells produced functional human liver tissue, complete with blood vessels.

Although efforts must now be made to ensure these techniques will work in human patients, the scientists say their study is "proof- of-concept" that "organ-bud transplantation provides a promising new approach to study regenerative medicine".

There is now a belief that it is essentially impractical to try and replicate in a test tube, the complex interactions that take place among different types of cells and tissues when an organ develops.

However, with their new study, Takebe and colleagues challenge this notion, and say you can overcome this barrier if you focus on the earliest process of organ generation, namely the cellular interactions that occur during "organ bud" development.

Observing this process led Takebe and colleagues to wonder if they could mimic the three-dimensional (3D) liver bud formation by mixing these three cell types together in a two-dimensional (2D) petri dish.

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Human Liver Tissue Grown From Stem Cells