Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that a protein called FOXA2 controls genes that maintain the proper level of bile in the liver. FOXA2 may become the focus for new therapies to treat diseases that involve the regulation of bile salts. The study was published online this week in Nature Medicine.

Sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) berries are well known for their cholesterol busting properties, but scientists in India say that its leaves are also rich in anti-oxidants and may help ward off liver disease, according to new research due to be published in the Society of Chemical Industry’s (SCI) Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

The University of Alberta Hospital (UAH) is one of only a few centers in Canada that perform living donor liver transplantation, a surgical procedure developed in the late 1980s that expands the organ donor pool. About 80 liver transplants are done a year in Alberta, 10 of those being living-donor.

Minority patients do not necessarily have worse outcomes after liver transplantation. When treated at the same medical centers as Caucasians, they fare just as well. These are the results of a new study in the November issue of Hepatology, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD).

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have a developed a totally new approach to treating liver failure – manipulating the immune response.

To meet the increasing demand for donor livers, researchers are searching for opportunities to utilize non-optimal livers to offer some improvement to severely ill patients. Some centers are now transplanting livers from hepatitis C (HCV)-infected donors into recipients with HCV-related cirrhosis.

While a liver biopsy is the standard method of diagnosis and disease progression for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), the most extreme form of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), researchers previously demonstrated that a less invasive blood test to determine caspase three-generated cytokeratin 18 fragment levels (a noninvasive biomarker test, CK-18) can predict the incidence and magnitude of NASH.

The way the liver renews itself may be simpler than what scientists had been assuming. A new study, appearing in the April 13 issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry, provides new information on the inner workings of cells from regenerating livers that could significantly affect the way physicians make livers regrow in patients with liver diseases such as cirrhosis, hepatitis, or cancer.