[A study of hepatocellular transplantation].

Clinical liver transplantation has been done for patients with irreversible hepatic diseases, but the shortage of donor livers from heart beating cadavers has become very serious. Hepatocyte transplantation requires no vascular anastomosis and donor hepatocytes are easy to obtain from living donors and easy to preserve for a long time. In the animal experiments, transplanted hepatocytes survived in the spleen for long periods of time, and cytochemical investigation revealed differentiated liver functions, such as gluconeogenesis, albumin synthesis, bilirubin conjugation. Intrasplenic transplantation of hepatocytes relieved congenital disorders of liver enzymes in rats. Moreover, transplanted hepatocytes re-composed normal cord structures with hepatic sinusoids in the spleen of rats. Hepatocytes could also be isolated from human cirrhotic livers by a multi-perfusion method, and the viability was almost 80%. After the success in transplantation of human hepatocytes into the spleen of athymic mice, 6 patients have undergone clinical trial of intrasplenic hepatocyte transplantation without any complications. In the future, the progress of gene manipulation techniques may make possible rapid growth of transplanted hepatocytes. Intrasplenic transplantation of isolated hepatocytes provides an in-vivo experimental model to study cellular growth and functions in detail.