A team from King’s College London (UK) has detected a type of cell that can regenerate liver tissue. With further adjustments and many more years of research, it is hoped that the cells could one day be used in cell-based therapies to treat liver failure without the need for transplants.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the team details the analysis of a new type of cell called the hepatobiliary hybrid progenitor (HHyP). HHyP appears to be a progenitor cell capable of transforming into the two types of cells that make up most of the liver tissue (hepatocytes and bile duct epithelial cells) in a similar way to a stem cell. The cell is believed to be used during early development in the womb, but it appears to exist in small numbers in adults as well.
“ For the first time, we have discovered that cells with true stem cell-like properties can exist in the human liver, ” said Tamir Rashid of King’s College Center for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine and lead author of the study. “This, in turn, could provide a wide range of regenerative medicine applications for treating liver disease, including the possibility of avoiding the need for liver transplants.”
“Now we need to work quickly to unlock the recipe to convert pluripotent stem cells into HHyP so that we can transplant those cells into volunteer patients. In the long term, we will also work to see if we can reprogram HHyP within the body using traditional pharmacological drugs to repair diseased livers without transplantation. cells or organs , “Rashid said.
The liver is the only internal human organ that has the ability to regenerate after damage, whether from physical injury, disease, obesity, or drug abuse. In fact, only a quarter of the original liver mass can regenerate back to full size. However, if the liver is continuously damaged, complete regeneration is prevented due to the development of scar tissue within the liver, known as cirrhosis.
Most intriguing of all to the researchers, HHyP cells closely resemble the progenitor cells that mice use to regenerate their liver after chronic injury. The exact nature of the liver progenitor cells that make regeneration possible in humans has long been a confusing topic. Now, based on these findings, researchers are a little closer to understanding the process and perhaps one day harnessing its power.
“Previous attempts to address fundamental questions surrounding the presence and nature of hepatic progenitors have been hampered by the lack of correlation between the human and mouse models and the limited resolution of lineage tracing strategies,” wrote the researchers in their study. “In contrast, the combination of carefully selected human tissue and single-cell analysis performed here has facilitated the identification of a hybrid progenitor population of the human fetal liver,” the authors conclude.
Referencia: Joe M. Segal, Deniz Kent, Daniel J. Wesche, Soon Seng Ng, Maria Serra, Bénédicte Oulès, Gozde Kar, Guy Emerton, Samuel J. I. Blackford, Spyros Darmanis, Rosa Miquel, Tu Vinh Luong, Ryo Yamamoto, Andrew Bonham, Wayel Jassem, Nigel Heaton, Alessandra Vigilante, Aileen King, Rocio Sancho, Sarah Teichmann, Stephen R. Quake, Hiromitsu Nakauchi, S. Tamir Rashid. Single cell analysis of human foetal liver captures the transcriptional profile of hepatobiliary hybrid progenitors. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11266-x
