Engineered liver for transplantation

•Engineering liver tissue addresses the shortage of donor organs for transplantation.•Survival of liver constructs largely depends on efficiency of nutrient delivery to the cells.•Whole liver scaffold is a viable platform for engineering liver for permanent support.•Whole liver engineering is a complex and challenging task.•Current efforts are focused on recapturing microarchitecture and transplantation.

Orthotopic liver transplantation is the only definitive treatment for end stage liver failure and the shortage of donor organs severely limits the number of patients receiving transplants. Liver tissue engineering aims to address the donor liver shortage by creating functional tissue constructs to replace a damaged or failing liver. Despite decades of work, various bottoms-up, synthetic biomaterials approaches have failed to produce a functional construct suitable for transplantation. Recently, a new strategy has emerged using whole organ scaffolds as a vehicle for tissue engineering. This technique involves preparation of these organ scaffolds via perfusion decellularization with the resulting scaffold retaining the circulatory network of the native organ. This important phenomenon allows for the construct to be repopulated with cells and to be connected to the blood torrent upon transplantation. This opinion paper presents the current advances and discusses the challenges of creating fully functional transplantable liver grafts with this whole liver engineering approach.

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