![Functional Liver Grown in Placenta]()
In the first use of human placenta for tissue engineering, Sanjeev Gupta, M.D., M.B.B.S., and colleagues seeded scaffold-supported human placentas with liver fragments from sheep, and the fragments developed into viable liver tissue. The achievement offers a new way to overcome donor liver shortages and help people awaiting liver transplants. The liver fragments that were transferred to the placentas contained all the cell types that comprise livers. The fragments grew within the placenta to form liver tissue with the same structure and functional ability (e.g., maintenance of albumin and urea synthesis) as the actual organ. When grafts of this liver tissue were transplanted into a sheep with liver failure, they rescued the sheep from liver failure and helped regenerate the damaged organ. The study was published online on March 26 in Hepatology. Dr. Gupta is professor of medicine and of pathology and is the Eleazar & Feige Reicher Chair in Translational Medicine at Einstein and is an attending physician at Montefiore Health System.
Posted on: Tuesday, May 15, 2018