The results of an important study published in the scientific journal Cell Reports describe the development of a new model capable of reconstructing key physiological features of the human liver, allowing the pathological processes that drive liver degeneration to be closely observed in the laboratory.
The study, supported by AIRC Foundation for Cancer Research, has been coordinated by Giovanni Sorrentino, Group Leader, Advanced Disease Models at ICGEB, and Associate Professor of Histology at the University of Trieste, and comprises a multidisciplinary team including biotechnologists, physicists, and clinicians, to integrate cellular biology, genomics, tissue engineering, and direct clinical observations to develop the unique research platform.
For the first time, the model developed by researchers allows the observation of the pathological processes that drive liver tissue degeneration in chronic diseases and tumour progression in a three-dimensional environment that faithfully reproduces the complexity of the human liver, preserving the interactions between different cell populations.