Humanized Liver Cells Grown Inside Mice

A graduate student from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a way to grow humanized liver cells inside mice and thereby potentially increasing the accuracy of drug tests conducted on the animals.

While mice are often used to test a number of drugs since their genetic makeup is 99 percent similar to humans, their livers do not react in the same way as human livers do and hence researchers are unable to find out whether the drugs are toxic to human livers.

However MIT's Alice Chen has now developed a way of growing human liver cells inside mice by suspending them over "scaffolds".

Chen and her team were also able to integrate the human liver cells with the mice's bloodstream and hence making sure that the drug reaches the implanted cells and proteins generated by the cells enter the mice's bloodstream.

Source: Medindia