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Healthy livers are being grown from rejected donor organs after British scientists discovered how to combat diseased tissue.
Researchers at the Royal Free in London have shown it is possible to strip away the damaged parts of donor livers and use the underlying structure as natural scaffold to rebuild a working organ.
The team are hoping that in the future stem cells from a transplant patient can be taken and used on the scaffold to grow a new liver which would not be rejected by the body.
It could allow doctors to reuse the 900 livers which are discarded each year because they are fatty, cancerous or unmatched. It could even pave the way for entirely new livers to be grown from scratch.
Dr Guiseppe Mazza, of the Royal Free, told the Evening Standard: “The long term is making new organs and reducing the need for organ donors.”