MIT Experts Grow Human Livers in Mice

A collaboration of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, announces the development of engineered mice that contain human liver cells. The new achievement could advanced the field of pharmaceutical drugs considerably.

When a new chemical is produced for drugs, experts need to know how the stuff will be processed by the liver. There are certain drugs that can harm this essential organ, and doctors need to be aware of any negative side-effects before prescribing any courses of treatments to their patients.

However, given that experts don't have access to artificial livers, many chemicals make their way to human clinical trials before researchers realize that something is wrong with them, and that they harm the liver or other organs.

Using the new mice developed at MIT, it will be possible to get extremely accurate simulations of how a drug will act on the human liver. Rather than using the rodents' livers as proxies, researchers actually created liver cells that are identical to those found in the human liver.

The research effort was conducted by MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) graduate student Alice Chen. Details of her groundbreaking work appear in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Using her mice, researchers will now be able to conduct in-depth studies of how the liver responds to new medication destined to fight infectious conditions, including hepatitis and malaria. Together, these diseases kill millions ever year around the world.

“What’s exciting to researchers is this idea that if we can create these mice with human livers, we can basically create a slew of human-like patients to do drug-development screens, or to […] develop new therapies,” Chen explains.

The student holds an appointment as a researcher in the lab of Sangeeta Bhatia, the HST John and Dorothy Wilson professor, and an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT.

Bhatia is also a member of the MIT David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and a coauthor of the PNAS study. Chen's research already won her the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, in March 2011.