Who Invented the Artificial Liver?
When you tell people about the artificial heart, they get pretty excited. In fact, the human heart is not much different from a pump, and people have been using similar pumps in their daily lives for thousands of years.
If you look at it from this perspective, you can see that the artificial heart is actually not that difficult. However, when it comes to producing an artificial liver, things are not so easy because a liver performs much more complex tasks than a heart.
Unlike the heart, the liver has to fulfill many different tasks at the same time. In addition to some other tasks it performs, the liver grinds the food we eat into usable pieces, separates harmful chemicals from these dishes, stores energy as glycogen, and also produces many substances from bile to protein, for example, it ensures that the bleeding that occurs as a result of possible cuts in our skin will stop after a while. So how can an artificial liver be created that can perform all these tasks?
Kenneth Matsumura's most notable achievement was inventing an artificial liver that makes use of live rabbit cells suspended in solution. He says he also has a patent on a wristwatch that sounds an alarm before the wearer has a heart attack.
Many methods have been tried to treat liver diseases. These include the hemodialysis method of replacing all the blood in a human body, but none of these methods have resulted in great success. However, in 2001 Dr. Kenneth Matsumura and his team succeeded in producing the first functional artificial liver. Matsumura and his team discovered that the most effective way to address this problem is to use a set of charcoal filters with cells from a living liver. The resulting device was able to perform many of the tasks of a normal liver, as it was partially made of cells from a real liver. The artificial liver produced by this method is used temporarily until a new liver is ready, rather than being used permanently on patients.
During the time of the invention of the first artificial liver, British scientists managed to produce liver using stem cells. It is believed that the organs produced by the stem cell method will eliminate the problem of organ donation in the future and that the desired organ can be regenerated whenever desired.
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