Best of the blog: Progress in liver disease

Liver disease has many causes ranging from various types of hepatitis to genetic mutations and alcohol damage. But when any of these causes lead to severe disease, the patients often find themselves on waiting lists for liver transplants. There are currently 16,000 people in the U.S. on that list and many of them will die before they get the needed organ.

Clearly, we need a way to repair, regenerate or replace livers without waiting for donors. On this blog, we’ve written about how our grantees and others around the world are progressing to stem cell-based treatments for liver disease. Here we have pulled together some of the most interesting of those posts. We start with the recent work of our grantees at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco, and move on to show what a global effort this is with projects on the U.S. East Coast, Japan and the United Kingdom. We close with a post for a video about a young girl whose life was turned around by a new liver.

1. Turning skin into mature liver cells

2. Miniature liver grown from stem cells

3. Scientists grow human liver cells in mice

4. Researchers create functional liver tissue

5. $1 million offered for first team to create fully functional liver

6. Liver transplant saves girl’s life

A complete list of CIRM grants for research in liver disease is on our web site.

Don Gibbons