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Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

This is my thought too. How many cells are actually need to do this. If it's just a few, surely if a patients kidney is in 80% bad shape, then they can take a few cells from the 20% good and do this?

I guess if there is a genetic problem with the patients own liver, then it would make sense to use another persons cells.

Ahh just read the last paragraph:

> If the liver trial is successful, Gouon-Evans says, it would be worth investigating whether a person’s own stem cells could be used to generate the cells that seed the lymph nodes. This technique could create personalized cells that capture the diversity of cells in the liver and don’t require immunosuppressive drugs, she says.

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This was my question too, so thanks for doing the legwork. Wondering (in complete ignorance of this general topic) why they didn't jump straight to that approach, though...

edit: I guess maybe if you start with a healthy liver, the variable of whether the liver disease in question could affect the viability of transplanted cells is taken out of question? Presumably the immune response/immunosuppressant stuff is better characterized.

That last paragraph is different though, it’s using stem cells to make liver cells, not using the patients liver cells directly..

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

Shoot I swear I RTFA!

TDD! They are passing the easier test first.

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