Research Projects

Liver regeneration is crucial for achieving functional recovery after partial hepatectomy. However, in chronic liver diseases, regenerative mechanisms become malfunctional, leading to disease progression. Current understanding relies on expensive animal models and clinical data, which are time-consuming and difficult to understand. The lab aims to develop mechanistic models to understand regeneration in normal liver and chronic liver diseases, particularly non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. They plan to generate human liver stem cell (hLSC) lines from normal donors and fabricate synthetic polymer scaffolds with tissue-like mechanical properties to mimic native tissue. These scaffolds will be coated with native ECM proteins and glycosaminoglycans to aid the differentiation of hLSC into hepatocytes and biliary cells. The technology involves creating tissue damage with controlled doses of pharmacological agents and studying the responses of hepatocytes and biliary cells upon tissue damage and the recovery of tissues after removal. This system will serve as a model to understand the response and recovery of normal tissues to tissue damage. The lab hopes a startup grant will help achieve these aims. Future experiments will compare regenerative responses to normal tissues from chronic liver disease patients at different stages of disease.