Human Liver Cells That Can Fully Regenerate Created In The Lab

Health and Medicine





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Fluorescently labelled human liver cells. Professor Yaakov Nahmias

The human liver is an incredible organ. It is one of the few organs that can regenerate, with people able to lose as much as 75 percent and yet still grow it back. With such incredible regeneration abilities, you might think that liver cells would be fairly easy to grow in the lab, but they’re not. Most attempts to expand and grow human liver cells in the lab, known as hepatocytes, result in immortalized cancer cells with not much metabolic function.