You will be able to “grow your own transplant liver in a lab within just five years,” says the Daily Mail.
This news story is based on research that demonstrated a method to develop skin cells into stem cells, which were then matured into liver cells. The researchers used this technique to develop lab-grown liver cells from patients with inherited liver diseases, which they hope might aid future research into diseases. They found that the new liver cells shared a number of characteristics with the patients’ liver cells.
The method developed in this research looks likely to be an invaluable technique for creating cell cultures that could be experimented on in the lab. However, this research did not aim to investigate how a fully-functional liver or transplantable cells could be grown in a lab, both of which are years away. Read more…
