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…
