A Body with Forty Livers

Dysfunctional liver?  Do not fear because now you can have forty functional livers all throughout your body!

Doesn’t that seem crazy?  Well, it is actually is a plan that has a good chance of working.  In University of Pittsburgh, a stem cell researcher named Eric Lagasse found a successful way of helping treat liver failure patients.  When pondering about how the scar tissue in a damaged liver doesn’t allow the organ to heal, Lagasse noticed that transplanted liver cells can grow in certain areas of the body.  So to test his theory, Lagasse used several healthy mice to transport liver cells into the end-stage liver disease mice.  A majority of the mice died within eight weeks (this is normal as they are at the end-stage of liver disease), however the ones that survived Lagasse injected liver cells into their belly.  That changed everything.  The mice began to get healthy.  After tracing the path of the imported liver cells, Lagasse found that the cells moved to the lymph nodes.  The lymph nodes are ideal things to use to grow a liver because they can expand to the size of an organ, and there are so many of them that it won't make a difference if one is sacrificed.  Additionally, lymph nodes have direct access to the bloodstream meaning that they can nurture the growing organ with nutrients, hormones, and signaling agents.  Through this experiment, Lagasse grew twenty to forty mini livers in mice with liver failure that slowly took the place of the dying liver.  The size of all the mini livers combined is 70% of a normal liver.  In the experiment, Lagasse did not have any rejections because the mice were genetically engineered to have the same DNA.  However, when he tries this treatment on humans, he is going to be depending on immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection.  Lagasse is also looking into a new technology that allows patients to be their own donors.  This is called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).  This technology allows adult cells to turn into embryonic stem cells.  Ultimately, they can become any cell, such as a healthy liver cell.  Although this cannot heal liver disease, it can keep a patient healthy until they receive a transplant.

When I first read about this plan, I thought it was ridiculous! Why would having forty livers help treat a liver disease patient?  As I read on though, I realized that it was an interesting plan.  It’s amazing how a tiny lymph node can become a whole liver.  Moreover, I found it intriguing how the liver can grow in other places.  It’s strange think about having a liver in the back of your knee instead of your abdomen.  It is also interesting because instead of having one liver, you have several.  So if one of the new ones fails, you have thirty-nine to back it up.  However, there are some things that I think that demeans this idea.  First off, say you get a liver in in the back of your knee.  Wouldn’t it be a pain to walk around with an extra pound on one leg?  Also, having a liver in the back of your knee isn’t exactly slightly.  Lastly, the liver cells can migrate to the lungs causing severe respiratory problems.  Overall, Eric Lagasse’s idea fascinating and will save millions of people.


Sources:
Article and Picture: http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/30-turning-lymph-nodes-into-liver-growing-factories