| Scientists generate liver cells from skin By David Mark Posted Thu May 12, 2011 12:53pm AEST A team of scientists in China has found a way to restore damaged livers using adult skin stem cells. The technique raises the possibility of what one liver specialist is calling the "Holy Grail" - that people now needing liver transplants could be simply treated with an injection of their own cells.
Researchers spent three years on the study in which they took skin cells from mice to reproduce fully functional liver cells.
The results, being published in the Journal of Nature today, show the mice were able to live healthy lives.
Professor Geoff McCaughan, the head of the Liver Research Program at the Centenary Research Institute at the University of Sydney, is excited by the Chinese team's work.
He has worked nationally and internationally in the field of liver transplants for 25 years and says the findings could have dramatic ramifications.
Every year, around 200 Australians have a liver transplant.
"The commonest cause for liver transplantation is the adult community in the western world is people with chronic hepatitis C infection who develop sclerosis or liver cancer," Professor McCaughan said.
The Chinese scientists have generated large amounts of liver cells in the test tube.
"Then using them to treat animals, in this case a mouse, then dying of liver failure with 100 per cent mortality or 100 per cent death rate, and then transfusing these new cells and only having a 50 per cent death rate," he said.
"The really exciting bit is that they've generated these liver cells from non-liver cells - what they've done is get them out of old skin and then transform these cells from skin cells into liver cells."
Professor McCaughan says the process should be achievable with human cells.
But he says people would have to also stop whatever was producing the liver damage in the first place.
"You would have to have drugs and other treatments to control the toxicity while the new cells in a human grow and weren't subjected to the same toxicities," he said.
"So that's an important concept and an important difference between doing it in humans and doing it in mice.
"Conceptually, it could be done, there's no question about that."
Professor McCaughan says the technique, if it worked for humans, would first be used to keep people alive while they waited for a transplant.
"If that worked and that was successful, then people could undertake the Holy Grail with this type of approach," he said.
"On an individual basis, which would be enormously resource intensive, you would essentially be having to have a group of scientists and medical people working on an individual patient's cells in the test tube in a laboratory in the same for liver disease in the same way they do now for bone marrow transplantations.
"But that would be the Holy Grail ... that's the dream, we love to live the dream."
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发表于 2011-5-13 00:23
