Latest Hepatocyte Stories

CHIBA, Japan, Oct. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Transparent, Inc., a bio-venture business headquartered here, announced today that it will be introducing Cell-able (http://www.cell-able.com), a human hepatocyte array kit that has the potential to reduce drug development costs and time-to-market for pharmaceutical companies, at its exhibit at the annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics (www.issx.org ) in Baltimore, Maryland, October 18-22. It is estimated that more...

A combination of bioengineering and medical research at the University of California, San Diego has led to a new discovery that could pave the way for more effective treatments for liver disease.In this work, the researchers have utilized an array system that can identify the biological components that can lead to or alleviate liver disease. The technology works by controlling the range of environments surrounding star-shaped liver cells called hepatic stellate cells (HSCs). HSCs are the...

Drug toxicity testing may improve because a new process helps keep cultured liver cells alive, U.S. researchers suggest. The report, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes how liver cells grown in a high-oxygen environment and in a culture medium free of animal-derived serum quickly began to function as they did within the liver. Finding a better way to culture liver cells has been a major stumbling block in the development of predictive drug-discovery tools,...

Mass. General-developed strategy dramatically improves function of cultured liver cellsA team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers has developed an innovative way to culture liver cells for drug toxicity screening. In a report to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that has been released online, the investigators describe how liver cells grown in a high-oxygen environment and in a culture medium free of animal-derived serum quickly begin to...

Researchers at INSERM (France) have engineered a chimeric protein that increases cell survival, migration and proliferation to improve stem cell engraftment. The results, which appear in the September 2009 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, show that TAT-Tpr-Met, a cell permeable form of the hepatocyte growth factor receptor can increase the number of hepatic stem cells integrated into the liver of the mouse. TAT-Tpr-Met is the result of the fusion of Tpr-Met, an autoactived tyrosine...

If you have hay fever, headaches or a cold, it's only a short way to the nearest chemist. The drugs, on the other hand, can take eight to ten years to develop. Until now animal experiments have been an essential step, yet they continue to raise ethical issues. "Our artificial organ systems are aimed at offering an alternative to animal experiments," says Professor Heike Mertsching of the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart....

Harness the Dual Benefits of Freshly Isolated Plateability and the Efficiencies of Cryopreservation CHICAGO, June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- In today's competitive environment and economic climate, the financial implications of being the first to file a promising new drug compound or chemical entity cannot be underestimated. Researchers and drug manufacturers are under even greater pressure to do more with less, and productivity and cost savings are at a premium. In the race to succeed, fresh...

German scientists say they have determined the reason transplanted liver cells don't proliferate as well in older recipients as they do in younger ones. Researchers at Germany's Martin Luther University said they determined that while the age of the donor makes no difference, the age of the recipient is significantly important -- and many humans requiring liver transplantation are older. The German study conducted in rats found that older rats had a repopulation rate of only 2 percent, 10...

Lower levels of needed growth factor may be the reasonWhen things go right, transplanted healthy liver cells transplanted by infusion or injection will find their way to the liver, integrate into the damaged tissue, start proliferating, and take over the liver's work of helping with digestion and removing waste products and worn-out cells from the blood. Hepatocyte transplantation has been successful in a number of animal models, raising hopes that use of cells could overcome the shortage of...

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Engineering in Medicine (MGH-CEM) has found the first evidence of cell-to-cell communication by amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, rather than by known protein signaling agents such as growth factors or cytokines. Their report will appear in an upcoming issue of the FASEB Journal and has been released online."We were taken by complete surprise," says Rohit Jindal, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at...