Growing Human Livers: Current Progress (2025)

Growing Human Livers: Current Progress (Mid- 2025) and Future Potential

Scientists are making remarkable progress toward growing functional human livers using bioengineering techniques that share similarities with cloning approaches. While we're not quite at full-scale liver production yet, the field has achieved several groundbreaking milestones that suggest this goal is achievable.

Current Achievements

Miniature Functional Livers

Researchers have successfully created miniature human livers that function like natural organs. Teams at Wake Forest University have engineered livers about an inch in diameter that weigh 0.2 ounces, demonstrating that human liver cells can be used to generate functioning liver tissue. These mini-livers secrete bile acids and urea just like normal livers.

Japanese scientists have made particularly impressive advances by creating 4-millimeter "liver buds" from human stem cells that, when transplanted into mice, work in conjunction with the animals' organs and produce human liver-specific proteins. This represents the first time people have made a solid organ using pluripotent stem cells.

Multiple Bioengineering Approaches

Scientists are pursuing several promising methods:

• Decellularization: Researchers take animal livers, remove all cells with mild detergent, leaving only the collagen "skeleton," then repopulate it with human liver cells
• Stem cell conversion: Converting human skin cells into stem cells, then coaxing them to become liver cells
• 3D bioprinting: Using advanced printing techniques to create liver scaffolds
• Organoid development: Growing "mini-organs" from stem cells that can repair damaged liver tissue

Breakthrough Human Trials

The field has reached a significant milestone with the first human trial beginning in 2024. A volunteer with severe liver disease received an experimental treatment designed to grow a second "mini liver" in their lymph node. This approach injects healthy liver cells into lymph nodes, where they can develop into functional liver tissue while some cells migrate to help regenerate the existing damaged liver.

Current Limitations and Challenges

Scale Requirements

While current mini-livers are functional, they need significant scaling up. An adult human liver weighs about 4.4 pounds, but researchers estimate that an engineered liver would need to weigh about one pound to sustain human life, since livers functioning at 30% capacity can support the body.

Technical Hurdles

Key challenges that researchers are actively addressing include:

• Cell production: Learning to grow billions of liver cells simultaneously
• Vascularization: Creating proper blood vessel networks within the engineered tissue
• Bile duct construction: Developing fully functional bile drainage systems
• Long-term functionality: Ensuring engineered livers maintain function over time

Future Timeline and Prospects

The research suggests that patient-specific liver substitutes are achievable through continued optimization and integration of induced pluripotent stem cells. However, scientists emphasize they're still at an early stage, with many technical hurdles requiring resolution before patient treatment becomes routine.

Bioengineered liver tissues currently need "additional rounds of molecular fine tuning before they can be tested in clinical trials", but the rapid advancement in recent years suggests this technology could become clinically viable within the next decade.

Beyond Transplantation

Engineered livers offer additional benefits beyond treating liver disease. They provide platforms for drug safety testing that more closely mimic human liver metabolism compared to animal models, and can serve as disease models for research purposes.

The field of liver bioengineering is advancing rapidly, with multiple successful approaches demonstrating that growing functional human livers is not just theoretically possible but actively being achieved in laboratories worldwide. While full-scale clinical implementation still requires overcoming significant technical challenges, the foundation has been established for what could become a revolutionary treatment for liver disease. 

Created with Perplexity

Sources:

The Conversation - How to grow human mini-livers in the lab to help solve liver disease
https://theconversation.com/how-to-grow-human-mini-livers-in-the-lab-to-help-solve-liver-disease-121297

Wake Forest University School of Medicine - Human Liver
https://school.wakehealth.edu/research/institutes-and-centers/wake-forest-institute-for-regenerative-medicine/research/replacement-organs-and-tissue/human-liver

New Atlas - Researchers grow laboratory-engineered miniature human livers
https://newatlas.com/bioengineered-miniature-human-livers/16790/

UPMC - Lab-Grown Miniature Human Livers Transplanted into Rats
https://www.upmc.com/media/news/052820-lab-grown-miniature-human-livers

CBS News - Researchers create miniature human liver out of stem cells
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/researchers-create-miniature-human-liver-out-of-stem-cells/

National Library of Medicine: Liver Bioengineering: Promise, Pitfalls, and Hurdles to Overcome
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31289714/

University of Cambridge - Lab-grown ‘mini-bile ducts’ used to repair human livers in regenerative medicine first
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/lab-grown-mini-bile-ducts-used-to-repair-human-livers-in-regenerative-medicine-first

MIT Technology Review - This company is about to grow new organs in a person for the first time
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/25/1058652/grow-new-organs/

Springer Nature - ‘Mini liver’ will grow in person’s own lymph node in bold new trial
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00975-z