THREE babies with life-threatening liver conditions have been saved by pioneering injections of healthy liver cells from donors. Doctors hope the method will work for adults, too.
“The first step is very much making it work in children,” says Nigel Heaton, one of the liver surgeons at King’s College Hospital in London who developed the procedure. “If we can do that, it becomes a viable treatment which we could take forward in adults.”
The three babies all had malfunctioning livers because of rare inherited disorders. To treat them, Anil Dhawan’s team injected liver cells called hepatocytes into the portal vein…
