Engineering a new way to study hepatitis C

Tissue engineers have successfully infected liver cells in the laboratory, allowing a better way to test new drugs.
Liver cells in a micropatterned co-culture form tube-like structures (shown here in green) that resemble bile capillaries found in a human liver. Image courtesy of Sangeeta Bhatia lab, MIT
Hepatitis C, a virus that can cause liver failure or cancer, infects about 200 million people worldwide. Existing drugs are not always effective, so many patients end up on long liver-transplant waiting lists.One reason that no better treatment options exist is the lack of a suitable liver tissue model to test new drugs in the laboratory. But now, researchers from MIT and Rockefeller University have successfully grown hepatitis C viruses in otherwise healthy liver cells.In the new tissue model, liver cells are precisely arranged on a specially patterned plate and surrounded by supportive cells, allowing them to live and function for four to six weeks. The cells can be infected with hepatitis C for two to three weeks, giving researchers the chance to study the cells’ responses to different drugs.“With this model system, one can study hepatitis C and its chronic effects in greater mechanistic detail,” says Salman Khetani, former MIT postdoctoral associate and an author of two recent papers on the work. “Since it uses normal human liver cells rather than cancer-derived ones, our system may provide a better understanding of how hepatitis C progresses in humans, and of potential cures.”The research team, led by Sangeeta Bhatia, professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Charles Rice of Rockefeller University, reported the new method in recent papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Biotechnology.