7 ms·
Machine keeps human livers alive for one week outside of the body
- blensor 7y agoI am not a medical expert or even remotely tied to that field but don't livers regrow to some extent? If this process could be extended even further wouldn't that mean we could regrow complete livers from partial donations pretty soon, making the whole "waiting for a donor" gamble obsolete?
- Zemke 7y agoYes. > The seven-day successful perfusion of poor-quality livers now allows for a wide range of strategies, e.g. repair of preexisting injury, cleaning of fat deposits in the liver or even regeneration of partial livers.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoI assume that this might even assist in the growth of livers (extracellular matrix, liver and circulatory tissues) from stem cells.
- Karlozkiller 7y agoNo expert either, but afaik you can divide livers into thirds and they will regrow. So when you transplant a liver you take two thirds from the donor, I assume to give the recipient more liver to work with, but I don't know why. (spelling edit)
- social_quotient 7y agoYeah seems 25% is needed for regrow. That number seems interesting, almost like the body’s parity raid bit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_regeneration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_regeneration
- samstave 7y agoFunny to use “parity raid bit” on an SPOF organ such as is the liver. Though, i have always been curious as to why the body only has one liver while having pairs of many other organs...
- ASalazarMX 7y agoAdding to your question, why did the liver evolve to regenerate while other organs evolved to have spares? What makes it special?
- akiselev 7y agoThe liver is responsible for clearing out the majority of toxins and since many of them can cause cell death, the organ needs to be able to regenerate itself.
- riversflow 7y agoI’m guessing it has something to do with the size of a liver. Organs that have spares are relatively small.
- abakker 7y agoLungs? They’re pretty big. My grandfather lived 60 years with only 1, and it stretched to fill most of his chest cavity.
- trhway 7y agoa plastic surgery to build in Klingon like capabilities - take the piece of the liver like for transplant and transplant it into the other side of the body, and after some time for regrow the person would just have 2 full livers.
- nkrisc 7y agoI'm not an expert but that won't stop me from guessing why! Perhaps it would be far easier for the donor to regrow the majority of their own liver in their own body than it would be for the recipient, given the immune response and other factors that I would imagine complicate a transplant.
- war1025 7y agoI think I read recently (don't know where, not looking it up) that the liver can regrow in the sense that it is made of lobes, and you can lose a lobe and the others will expand to restore full function. But the lobes themselves don't regenerate, so it's not a thing that can be done more than a time or two.
- coder1001 7y agoOne great use of this could taking good parts of a cancer's patient's liver, regrowing the parts independently and then putting back the part that does not show any sign of cancer. Not sure if one week will do it, but could be very viable when this tech is extended to more than a week. Major advantage of reusing one's liver is the body would be less likely to reject it, hence relying less on immune suppression medications.
- GGfpc 7y agoCan a person survive without a liver for 1 week?
- coder1001 7y agoYou wouldn't necessarily have to remove all of the liver. If you take say 50% of it, then the other 50% can regrow assuming a good chunk of it is still alive.
- toss1 7y agoBased on the experiences of a friend & close family member & what the doctors said: when your liver stops functioning, you will have about six weeks to live. The prognosis schedule was pretty much spot-on in both cases,and the last week has much less useful consciousness. Since the first few weeks are not really debilitating, I'd wager that one week without a liver to re-implant a repaired organ should be a good plan.
- golem14 7y agoOut of curiosity: Amanita poison I thought mostly attacked the liver and leads to death in much less than 6 weeks (more like a few days, maybe a week). So I assume the 6 weeks means massive effort in the ER to stabilize the patient without liver, maybe some advanced blood filtering?
- toss1 7y agoInteresting discrepancy. Both the ones I knew were in hospice and not a huge intervention for the six weeks, so not a tone of continuing intervention. I'd guess that liver failure is maybe defined not as 100% failure, but failure to keep up with daily demand due to an external impairment such as cancer, and that this is just a typical curve of declining function until the body becomes too poisoned to survive. Anybody with more detailed real bio/medical information?
- greatpatton 7y agoI'm wondering how do they control pathogens, as from my understanding the perfusate is lacking white blood cell. This is not described in the Nature article. However this kind of technologies open really a lot of new possibilities regarding organ transplantation, and even auto transplantation as describe at the end of the article.
- epmaybe 7y agoThe liver has reticuloendothelial tissues (along with spleen, lymph nodes) that do technically produce white blood cells. I'm not sure how much of this production is still active in adults.
- piterdevries 7y agoWhat about a head?
- mschuster91 7y agoThis one will probably take decades to get in a useful state. For head (or other organ) artificial alive-keeping we still don't know enough about how they work - and in case of especially the head we don't have the adequate technology yet to properly reconnect the neurons. It might be that we can do this sooner than keeping the full head alive though, given that there is way more investment in such research to help people with spinal injuries regain motor control.
- BurningFrog 7y agoIt seems like the inputs the head requires are pretty well defined. Oxygenated, nutrition loaded blood mainly. But I'm sure that misses 8 unsolvable essentials... Preserving sanity for the severed head is a whole other story.
- mschuster91 7y agoIt's more complicated than "only" blood. The hormones and other signalling chemicals involved in the brain-body communication are not really figured out - we don't even know what hormonal balance is "normal" and treat mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia with a "shotgun" approach - shoot a lot of loads and see which one has an effect.
- BurningFrog 7y agoThere are also nerve "cables" to interface with.
- aledalgrande 7y agoI've never heard about reconnecting severed nerves and have them function. Is that currently possible?
- pharke 7y agoI'm wondering if this will be a good test bed for keeping other organs alive outside the body. As far as I know, the liver is the most robust organ and so makes a natural starting point for this kind of work.
- julsimon 7y agoJust add some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
- awinter-py 7y agoor as jim jarmusch would say, only livers left alive
- baxtr 7y agoThe first question that popped into my mind is: does this work for brains too?