Clinical application of hepatocyte transplantation: what are the current limitations?

Purpose of review This review seeks to place the evolution of liver-cell transplantation into its historical context with a view to understanding what is limiting the development of this new therapy's wider clinical application. Recent findings The low number of available donor organs remains problematic to the development of the field. Transplants utilizing cryopreserved cells or cells isolated from nonbeating-heart donors may relieve this problem to some extent. Clinical trials have been undertaken for a range of metabolic liver diseases with variable clinical outcomes, although full disease correction has not yet been achieved and improvements in metabolic outcomes have not been sustained. Summary Although the road to clinical success of liver-cell transplantation has been slow and fraught with difficulty there is an increasing body of evidence that the technique is simple and relatively safe. Understanding donor-cell dynamics and mechanisms of graft loss posttransplantation will be an important field of enquiry that may herald a more promising era.