'Mini liver' will grow in person's own lymph node in bold new trial

Assuming a cirrhosed liver , how would that affect regrowth time? TIA.

Cirrhosis has been observed to reverse in some individuals. It is still permanent for most patients, and we shouldn’t give people with it false hope, but its reversal isn’t impossible. Most commonly cirrhosis reversal is observed after chronic viral hepatitis is cured by antiviral treatment. There are even a handful of clinical case reports of alcoholic cirrhosis reversing after extended abstinence from alcohol, even though that is a rather rare outcome. I remember reading a case report (sorry can’t find it right now), of a Japanese alcoholic diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, who then was severely disabled by a stroke, and had to be moved to a nursing home. He never drank again because he physically couldn’t drink without nursing staff assistance, and they weren’t going to give him any alcohol. Roughly 20 years later, his cirrhosis had disappeared. Of course, this is a rare outcome (he likely had favourable genetics, plus rarely does an alcoholic find relapse physically impossible), but it shows it can happen.

This is why there is a lot of hope that some of the liver disease drugs currently in the clinical pipeline may be able to reverse cirrhosis (and if not them, maybe their future successors). However, current trials are focusing on fibrosis not cirrhosis. And they run into the difficulty that what counts as cirrhosis seems reasonably clear in everyday clinical practice, but how to reliably detect its existence/progression/improvement/reversal to a clinical trial standard of certainty is difficult and a matter of dispute

(No I don’t have cirrhosis, as far as anyone knows, but my aunt had it-albeit asymptomatic, it was only discovered on autopsy after she suddenly and unexpectedly died from a cardiac arrest while asleep one night-which is actually very common, majority of people with liver disease die from heart disease before the liver disease kills them, or even causes any observable symptoms-but I do have intermittent hypochondria, and in some of my past hypochondriac episodes I have become rather obsessed with reading papers on this and related topics.)

Though, with lymph nodes as connected as they are, why do the liver cells stay where they're planted, so to speak?

It all just reminds me of Neal Asher's stories, where creatures build nano factories in their bodies as and when needed, including local fusion "nodes".

I have no idea why not, but my wife does a lot of work growing different cell types from stem cells, and my understanding is that that’s still like.. they think they are making cell types a, b or c, but it’s a lot of uncertainty. What they really do is convert the stem cells into cells that express m various markers/pass various tests that the “real” cell type also express.. but it’s really hard to know that it’s actually a 1-1 match.

Just yesterday she was lamenting they were making astrocyte cells, and many of the cells in the colony instead became.. something else, unclear what, maybe not even a cell type that exists in humans normally?

Either way: using healthy liver cells from a healthy liver would be a way to ensure you actually really have liver cells, and not something that just sorta duck-types as one