Scientists grow livers in the lab

When Steve Jobs received a liver transplant last year, some believe he used his money and status to increase his odds. No doubt, there's a long waiting line due to the organ storage in our country. While 15,000 patients are on the waiting list, there are only 4,500 cadaver donor livers to go around each year.

Many livers are thrown away because they aren't suitable for transplantation. But a team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital might soon remedy that.

Scientists created a piece of liver tissue in the lab. When they implanted the newly constructed liver into a rat and it remained functional for several hours.

"The basic idea is to grow a liver in the lab for transplantation," Dr Korkot Uygon at Harvard Medical School told The Telegraph. "If we succeed it will definitely revolutionize how liver diseases are treated."

By washing away liver cells from the donor rat liver, the researchers used the liver as a tissue scaffold to grow liver cells called hepatocytes on it.

The technique of washing out and replacing cells is the same as that used when a windpipe made with the patient's own stem cells was successfully implanted in Spain in late 2008 in the world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant, reports The BBC.

If the researchers can grow livers in the lab for humans, they will be able to grow new livers and possibly help fix damaged organs.The transplantable liver graft works on the most simple level. But the researchers will have to add other types of cells to the scaffold, so the liver can fight off offending pathogens.

Still, who is to say the livers deemed unsuitable for transplantation will even be good enough to act as a scaffold? Eventually, the researchers hope livers grown in labs could be harvested on artificial scaffolds or pig livers, so human donors won't be necessary.

The Daily Mail is more optimistic — imagining these livers could be 'made to order' for humans in just 5 years.