This technological advance will allow patients with formerly inoperable liver cancers to gain access to surgical resection. Additionally, performing autologous transplantation (patient receives liver tissue from his own body) will avoid the need for life-long immunosuppression and its associated severe side effects. This novel regeneration strategy could also be used in allogenic liver transplantation (patient receives liver tissue from a donor) for end-stage chronic liver disease, where an organ transplant is the only treatment option. In this second approach, a healthy donor liver will be split into a couple of parts that will be grown in the perfusion machine, yielding more than one transplantable organ. With this approach, the organ donor pool would be increased, which would help to alleviate current donor organ shortage.
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