People become quite excited about artificial hearts. But, when you think about it, the heart is basically a pump, the same kind of pump that people have been using for thousands of years. Described in these terms, it does not sound quite so advanced. By contrast, an artificial liver is a complex achievement.
Far from the one trick pony that the heart is, the human liver has to undertake many tasks simultaneously. Among other functions, it helps to break down food into usable substances, detoxifies harmful chemicals,, stores energy in the form of glycogen, and manufactures any number of substances from bile to the proteins that make cuts stop bleeding. But how do you combine all those different functions into an artificial liver?
Numerous ways have been tried to treat liver failure, from replacing the entire blood volume in a person's body with new blood to hemodialysis. All have met with little success. However, in 2001, Dr. Kenneth Matsumura and his team were among the first to produce functioning artificial livers. Matsumura and his team decided the best way to approach the problem was to take living liver cells and place them in sequence with a series of charcoal filters. The resulting device performed most of the activity that a normal liver would carry out because it was partially made of normal liver cells. It is mostly used as a bridge until a new liver is available for transplant rather than as a full replacement, but further test results are promising. British scientists have since created the first artificial liver tissue from stem cells. In time it is hoped that it will provide whole organs for transplant.
