Artificial liver composed of liver slice culture system

Park, Sung Soo; Han, Jae Jin

Abstract

Acute hepatic failure is one of the most fatal in clinical medicine, as it can be associated with a mortality rate of 80~ 90%. For the treatment of acute hepatic failure orthotopic liver transplantation and conservative medical treatment has been tried. Despite its high mortality rate of acute hepatic failure, if regeneration exceeds degeneration, the hepatic structure and function of patient may return to normal. And it is necessary to provide physiological support and to "buy time" until a new liver is procured and render patients stable and more likely to survive transplantation. Bio-Artificial Liver is a mechanical device containing bioreactor filled with hollow fiber attached hepatocytes. Recently hybrid artificial liver composed of bioreactor and charcoal column is widely used. But conventional bioreactor only reflecting cell to cell interaction is inefficient due to ignoring cell to connective tissue interaction existing in vivo state. Our invention-liver slice culture system-can exactly reflect structural and functional integrity of in vivo states. So we tried to replace conventional bioreactor with liver slice culture system to maintain physiological state. For the establishment and evaluation of new artificial liver composed of liver slice culture system, experimental dog with hepatic failure was treated with artificial liver. We observed statistically significant decrease of plasma LDH level and elimination activities of toxic materials such as ammonia and bilirbin although statistically not significant because of small number of experimental animal. From these results we confirmed the efficacy of bio-arificial liver composed of liver slice culture system.