Biotechnology Process Engineering Center

Breakthrough "Liverchip" Mimics Living Organ

The liver performs crucial functions that range from the metabolism of drugs and toxins to the production of proteins and other essential molecules. Numerous diseases can affect the liver, so laboratory study of liver cells is crucial to our understanding of the liver and treatments for its diseases.

Liver cell cultures created with current methods only survive for relatively short periods of time, making reliable data relevant to the function of an intact liver difficult to obtain. Enter the "liverchip"—a living model of the liver that allows researchers to grow what is essentially a small liver and perform tests on it without risking a person's life or health.

The liverchip is a three-dimensional cell culture system that fosters the growth of liver cells and facilitates the study of liver function. It is the brainchild of Linda Griffith, Director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center (BPEC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The "chip" consists of two flow chambers with a tissue scaffold between them, which creates a bioreactor set-up. The chip is seeded with liver cells. A pump creates an ideal flow of nutrients over the chip's scaffolding, subjecting cells to the mechanical stresses, fluid flow rates, and nutrients required by liver cells in the body. Cells expand and grow over the walls of the chip, forming tissue nodules that behave like an in vivo liver.

This system facilitates experiments that investigate the liver's interaction with other cell types, its metabolism of drugs and toxins, our understanding of liver regeneration and stem cell differentiation, and the efficacy of new therapeutics. The liverchip will substantially improve the study of disease pathogenesis, tissue engineering, pharmacology and toxicology, leading to the development of better screening systems for new therapies.

Ultimately, this idea could revolutionize biomedicine by providing a vehicle to grow models of various bodily organs from the cells of individual donors. The new models could bypass the use of lab animals, and could allow drug testing and other experiments on "mini-organs" that have been custom-grown from specific patients with those patients' unique characteristics, thus offering greater assurance about therapeutic outcomes.

To learn more about this topic:
See the Biotechnical Process Engineering Center's web site at http://web.mit.edu/bpec/

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BPEC's new "liverchip" produces an artificial liver on
a small scale that is suitable for research and testing..

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Last modified: April 2, 2006