Scientists make progress towards liver failure treatment
Liver cells derived from stem cells. Photo: A*Star's Genome Institute of Singapore
Updated 13 March, 2018
SINGAPORE — In what could lead to more effective ways to treat liver failure, scientists have discovered methods to efficiently generate pure liver cells from human stem cells.
The team of scientists also successfully grafted the liver cells generated into mouse models with liver injuries and improved their short-term survival rate “remarkably”.
Led by Dr Ang Lay Teng and Dr Bing Lim from the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS), Professor Kyle Loh and Professor Irving Weissman from Stanford University’s School of Medicine and Dr Chen Qingfeng from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Singapore, their aim was to artificially generate large numbers of liver cells from human embryonic stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells have the potential to turn into thousands of cell-types in the human body, said Dr Ang.