Mar 4, 2026 01:48 AM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1118561
INTRO: More than 10,000 Americans who suffer from chronic liver disease are on a waitlist for a liver transplant, but there are not enough donated organs for all of those patients. Additionally, many people with liver failure aren’t eligible for a transplant if they are not healthy enough to tolerate the surgery.
To help those patients, MIT engineers have developed “mini livers” that could be injected into the body and take over the functions of the failing liver.
In a new study in mice, the researchers showed that these injected liver cells could remain viable in the body for at least two months, and they were able to generate many of the enzymes and other proteins that the liver produces.
“We think of these as satellite livers. If we could deliver these cells into the body, while leaving the sick organ in place, that would provide booster function,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).
Bhatia is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in the journal Cell Biomaterials. MIT postdoc Vardhman Kumar is the paper’s lead author... (MORE - details, no ads)
INTRO: More than 10,000 Americans who suffer from chronic liver disease are on a waitlist for a liver transplant, but there are not enough donated organs for all of those patients. Additionally, many people with liver failure aren’t eligible for a transplant if they are not healthy enough to tolerate the surgery.
To help those patients, MIT engineers have developed “mini livers” that could be injected into the body and take over the functions of the failing liver.
In a new study in mice, the researchers showed that these injected liver cells could remain viable in the body for at least two months, and they were able to generate many of the enzymes and other proteins that the liver produces.
“We think of these as satellite livers. If we could deliver these cells into the body, while leaving the sick organ in place, that would provide booster function,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).
Bhatia is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in the journal Cell Biomaterials. MIT postdoc Vardhman Kumar is the paper’s lead author... (MORE - details, no ads)