Liver tissue engineering

Hepatocytes are a cell-type, of particular interest in tissue engineering due to the regenerative capacity of the liver and the quantity of waiting liver transplant recipients, for which there are too few available organ donors. While the asialoglycoprotein receptor on hepatocytes does not... 

Bioreactor Developments for Tissue Engineering Applications by the Example of the Bioartificial Liver... 

Other recently developed biomaterials will be used for quite different purposes in tissue engineering such as artificial pancreas and liver, artificial skin, nerve regeneration, gene therapy vascular grafts, cornea replacement and others.3... 

AUen, J.W., and Bhati, S. N., Engineering liver therapies for the future. Tissue Eng. 

Despite these failures, the need still exists for alternative liver therapies. Several new techniques including cell transplantation, tissue-engineered constructs, and extra- and paracorporeal devices seek to relieve some of the demands placed on a compromised liver. Liver assist devices allow the liver to regenerate its function by removing some of the demands. Bridge-to-transplant devices seek to maintain patients until suitable donors are available. Some therapies seek to remove toxins from the blood, and they have a place in the treatment scheme, but due to the complex and multifunctional nature of the organ, some type of cell-based therapy is considered a more complete solution. 

Despite advances in hepatocyte culture, tissue engineering of the liver faces significant challenges.One important factor in the development of a self-sufficient hepatic device is vascularization. While in the early stages of development, a device can be maintained by providing sufficient void volume the device ultimately will have to provide for natural supplies of raw materials. This is one of the factors that makes the development of a biodegradable implanted device problematic. Not only must the so-called biodegradable scaffold (and its associated problems) be resorbed... 

Bhandari RN, Riccalton LA, Lewis AL, Fry JR, Hammond AH, Tendler SJ, et al. Liver tissue engineering A role for co-culture systems in modifying hepatocyte function and viability. Tissue Eng 2001 7 345-57. 

Mullon, C. Soloman, B.A. HepatAssist liver support system. In Principles of Tissue Engineering, 2nd Ed. Lanza, R.P., Langer, R., Vacanti, J., Eds. Academic Press New York, 2000 553-558. 

An intr iguing prospect of the merger of tissue engineering and gene therapy is gfimpsed from research on treating liver diseases. Liver diseases affect approximately 20 mUfion people in tire USA alone and many of the 40,000 deaths attributable to liver failures could be prevented by treatments of liver damage. ... 

Chitosan scaffolds may find application in regeneration of skin tissue, liver tissue, bone and cartilage tissue, cardiac tissue, corneal tissue, and vascular tissue to mention a few [73]. A brief account of its application in various branches of tissue engineering is described in this section. 

Table 4 Application of chitosan scaffolds to liver tissue engineering... 

GC showed excellent Park et ai. adhesion and spheroid [114] formation of hepatocytes due to the galactose-specific recognition between GC molecules and ASGR of hepatocytes and provides a good alternative as a synthetic ECM for liver tissue engineering... 

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