Scientists discover that three-dimensional liver buds grown in a dish from stem cells mimic the molecular signatures observed during the natural development of human liver

An international team of researchers led by Barbara Treutlein of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Takanori Takebe of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, USA, and Yokohama City University, Japan, used novel genomic and stem cell technologies to understand how individual cells work together and use their genomes to develop into human liver tissue. This new research greatly advances efforts to bioengineer healthy and usable human liver tissue from human pluripotent stem cells. Still, researchers say the tissues need additional rounds of molecular fine tuning before they can be tested in clinical trials.