Decellularization is the most promising near term approach to generating patient-matched organs for transplantation. It is a fairly simple concept at root: researchers remove all of the cells from an organ, leaving the scaffold of the extracellular matrix with all of its intricate details and chemical cues. The challenge lies in building a reliable methodology that can be scaled up for widespread use. Much of the work on decellularization to date has focused on hearts and lungs, but in the paper noted here, researchers outline a method for reliably decellularizing whole livers.

Decellularization does of course require a donor organ as a starting point, unfortunately, but that can include a significant fraction of the potential donor organs that would normally be rejected by the medical community for one reason or another, as well as organs from other species, such as pigs. Given suitably genetically engineered pigs, a decellularized pig organ repopulated with human cells should contain no proteins that will provoke significantly harmful responses following transplantation. This and other options should roll out into availability in the years ahead, ahead of the range of more ambitious tissue engineering projects that aim to grow entire organs from a patient cell sample.

Decellularization is ahead of other methodologies for the creation for patient-matched organs because the research community has yet to produce a good method of generating the intricate networks of tiny blood vessels that are needed to support tissue much larger than a millimeter or two in depth - the distance that nutrients can perfuse in the absence of capillaries. Yet over the past few years many research groups have demonstrated the production of organoids, tiny sections of complex, functional organ tissue, for a variety of organs. Thus the actual production of organs from patient cells will be a going concern just as soon as the blood vessel question is figured out. Unfortunately, this has been the state of the field for years now, with many promising leads but no definitive end in sight. Meaningful progress in bringing decellularization to the medical community is to be welcomed in the meanwhile.

Decellularization of Whole Human Liver Grafts Using Controlled Perfusion for Transplantable Organ Bioscaffolds