By MARTYN HALLE
SCIENTISTS have developed a treatment that could save the lives of hundreds of people needing liver transplants – they have discovered how patients can ‘regrow’ their own livers.
During the new procedure, doctors remove healthy cells from a patient’s own liver, grow them for up to a week in a laboratory – and then infuse them back into the liver. There, they continue to multiply.
At present, there is no way of keeping alive critically ill liver patients for long enough to receive a transplant if one is not available immediately.
There is also an enormous demand for livers, and doctors say that is likely to increase dramatically because of rising rates of obesity, heart disease and hepatitis C.
Doctors have struggled for years to grow enough liver cells in the laboratory to save seriously ill patients.
But researchers have employed a relatively new surgical technique that allows the new liver cells to grow rapidly when put back into the liver.
The method, embolisation, has already been used to help patients with liver cancer grow more liver cells after surgery to remove their tumours.
Surgeons cut off some of the blood supply of the liver where the cells are infused, and this forces that part of the liver to work rapidly to make new cells.
So far, only animal trials have taken place, involving the removal of cells.
But human trials are expected to start in the next few weeks on new-born babies with major liver failure who might otherwise die.
Results of the research were reported yesterday at the conference of the United European Gastroenterology Conference in Copenhagen by doctors from the Hospital St Antoine in Paris.
Dr Andrew Burroughs, a liver specialist at London’s Royal Free Hospital, said: ‘This is a really exciting development which opens up the possibility that soon the majority of patients will not need a donor liver transplant.
‘We are desperately short of donor livers and often lose patients because an organ cannot be found in time.
‘There are also patients we would like to put on the transplant list but cannot because of the shortage of organs. So patients are prioritised for transplant.’ The number of donor organs becoming available in the UK is less than half the rate of many other European countries. Italy and Spain have among the highest donor liver rates.
A growing number of patients developing liver failure suffer from obesity and heart disease. The damage is caused by a build-up of cholesterol.
Dr Burroughs says: ‘The popular misconception is that the majority of patients with liver failure are alcoholics. Patients with diseased and damaged livers due to alcohol abuse form a large number of those needing transplant, but they are in a minority.
‘The benefit of using a patient’s own liver cells to regrow their liver is that they not only avoid transplant, but also would not need to spend the rest of their lives on anti-rejection drugs.
‘We also know that even those who have successful liver transplants may – after 15 or 20 years – need a new liver. Growing and infusing liver cells would get round those difficulties.’
Healthy cells are removed from the patient’s liver to be grown in laboratory 2. Cells returned a week later but only after surgeons cut off some of liver’s blood supply, tricking it into reproducing cells rapidly so it regenerates itself
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