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Tissue model reveals key players in liver regeneration

By tracing the steps of liver regrowth, MIT engineers hope to harness the liver’s regenerative abilities to help treat chronic disease.

The human liver has amazing regeneration capabilities: Even if up to 70 percent of it is removed, the remaining tissue can regrow a full-sized liver within months.

Taking advantage of this regenerative capability could give doctors many more options for treating chronic liver disease. MIT engineers have now taken a step toward that goal, by creating a new liver tissue model that allows them to trace the steps involved in liver regeneration more precisely than has been possible before.

The new model can yield information that couldn’t be gleaned from studies of mice or other animals, whose biology is not identical to that of humans, says Sangeeta Bhatia, the leader of the research team… Continue reading.

More News from Sangeeta N. Bhatia, MD, Ph.D.

Sangeeta N. Bhatia, MD, Ph.D.
Synthetic Biology and Tissue Engineering Grow Liver Tissue In-Body
Damage to the liver in patients developing end-stage liver disease has become too severe for the organ’s normally extraordinary regenerative capacity to repair or compensate for that damage. Once this point of no return has been reached the only option...
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Circadian rhythms can influence drugs’ effectiveness
MIT researchers find circadian variations in liver function play an important role in how drugs are broken down in the body. Giving drugs at different times of day could significantly affect how they are metabolized in the liver, according to a new study...
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Inhalable sensors could enable early lung cancer detection
The diagnostic, which requires only a simple urine test to read the results, could make lung cancer screening more accessible worldwide. Using a new technology developed at MIT, diagnosing lung cancer could become as easy as inhaling nanoparticle sensors...
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CRISPR-Cas-amplified urinary biomarkers for multiplexed and portable cancer diagnostics
Synthetic biomarkers, bioengineered sensors that generate molecular reporters in diseased microenvironments, represent an emerging paradigm in precision diagnostics. Despite the utility of DNA barcodes as a multiplexing tool, their susceptibility to nucleases...
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Nanoparticle sensor can distinguish between viral and bacterial pneumonia
Using this diagnostic, doctors could avoid prescribing antibiotics in cases where they won’t be effective. Many different types of bacteria and viruses can cause pneumonia, but there is no easy way to determine which microbe is causing a particular patient’s...
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