MORE help for people with faulty livers is on the way.
Patients waiting for a transplant will soon be able to plug into boxes of
liver cells to help keep them going (see p 17). Most of these treatments use pig
liver cells, but these cells have to be obtained fresh for each treatment.
Frozen liver cells refuse to stick to a surface and grow after they are thawed
out, so they soon die.
Now Helen Grant from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow has found a
simple solution. She sticks the cells to a plastic sheet before she freezes
them. Those cells thaw out and grow just fine, she told the British Association
Festival of Science in Glasgow this week.
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