Name of the Group:
Innovative Models for Liver Diseases Unit
Board Members:
Cristina Bellarosa (Senior Scientist)
Benedetta Blarasin (PhD Student)
Romar Dabban (PhD Student)
Giorgia Ferron (Master student)
DESCRIPTION OF THE UNIT:
The unit develops new experimental models for studying liver diseases from a personalized medicine perspective. Two main tools have been developed: Induced hepatocytes non-invasively derived from iPSCs obtained from adult cells isolated from urine and organoids obtained from adult hepatocytes.
INSIGHTS
Innovative models for truly personalized medicine
What is personalized medicine?
Personalized medicine is an approach to care that takes into account each person's unique characteristics, such as genetics, lifestyle, and environment. The idea is that every patient is different, and therefore therapies should be tailored to them, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution.
Personalized medicine aims to provide better and more targeted treatment because it allows:
- Predict which drugs will work best for a given patient;
- Identify the risk of developing certain diseases early;
- Monitor more precisely the evolution of the disease and the response to treatments.
For this reason, it is considered an innovative approach to be favored and developed in medicine.
What is the purpose of personalized medicine in hepatology?
Despite major medical advances, there are still several liver diseases whose molecular mechanisms are still unknown. For this reason, it is not always possible to make an accurate diagnosis, and consequently, also therapies are limited or ineffective.
How is personalized medicine practiced in hepatology?
To improve diagnosis and therapies it is essential to have experimental models that can reproduce the functioning of the human liver and the evolution of pathologies in the laboratory, and that can be obtained starting from the individual patient.
Our unit has developed induced hepatocytes and liver organoids as innovative experimental models.
The Induced hepatocytes are liver cells obtained in the laboratory from a patient or donor. While they are not 100% identical to natural hepatocytes, they mimic many of their key characteristics and essential functions, such as drug metabolism, plasma protein production, and toxic substance management.
The liver organoids are small three-dimensional structures grown in the laboratory that mimic some of the functions and organization of the human liver. They aren't true mini-livers, but they reproduce the behavior of liver cells quite well, making them a very useful model for research.
