News & Events: Liver Transplant

UCSF News Reports on a novel surgical approach to transplanting cells into diseased organs developed by Tammy T. Chang, MD, PhD, a gastrointestinal and acute care surgeon and principal investigator in the The Chang Laboratory for Liver Tissue Engineering, and Boris Rubinsky, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. The technique is called irreversible electroporation, or IRE, and enables newly transplanted clusters of liver cells, or hepatocytes to thrive and proliferate in a mouse liver. The research, reported in the May issue of the journal BioTechniques, could one day [...]

Alfonso Garcia and his parents pose with the UCSF medical team that cared for him during his 2010 life-saving liver transplant. From left: mother Marta Garcia; Emily Perito, MD; nurse practitioner Susan Diaz, MSN; Garcia; Philip Rosenthal, MD; and father Oscar Garcia. Alfonso Garcia still carries around a baseball cap that belonged to a 22-year-old man who passed away in 2010 having never met him. But the cap is just a small token of an even bigger reminder that the 18-year-old college freshman carries with him every day: the man's liver, which saved Garcia's life. Since receiving [...]