WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, POLARQUEEN
Mice with implanted 20-millimetre-long artificial human livers break down toxins in a way that is closer to how humans do it than traditional lab mice, according to a study published this week (July 11) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This insight can provide researchers with better models for testing drug toxicity.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology grew the tiny human livers by seeding plastic scaffolds with mouse fibroblasts, human hepatocytes, and human liver endothelial cells. They then implanted the artificial organs into mice. Testing the animals with drugs known to be metabolized differently in mice and humans, the humanized mice performed much more like humans than normal mice. Despite the fact that the implants only contained about 500,000 human ...
