Is China’s man-made liver therapy a game-changer for millions battling liver failure globally?
- The stem cell-based bio-artificial liver has been approved for clinical trials to help liver patients remove toxins from their blood
- Promising technology could be on the verge of a breakthrough in commercial use, report says
Chinese authorities have given the green light for clinical trials of a stem cell-based artificial liver – a development that could help millions of people battling liver failure.
A Chinese team has created a bioreactor for a bio-artificial liver – a device outside the body that performs the liver’s job of detoxification and synthesising proteins and chemicals necessary for digestion and growth.
Blood flows through the bioreactor system, which uses a hollow fibre membrane to grow stem cells and essential substances, which are then introduced to a patient’s bloodstream and help them regenerate tissue and suppress liver damage caused by inflammation.
Similar membranes are widely used in other medical processes, such as dialysis, but this is the first time it has been used to culture stem cells.
Before gaining approval for clinical use, however, the innovative device must demonstrate that it can deliver results over several phases of clinical trials.
“In animal models involving pigs and monkeys, we observed that our method increased the survival rate from 17 per cent, as seen with conventional treatments, to 87.5 per cent,” said Gao Yi, executive director of the Translational Medicine Centre at Zhujiang Hospital of Southern Medical University in Guangdong province.