Surprising Discovery: Skin Communicates With Liver

Dec. 6, 2013 — Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have discovered that the skin is capable of communicating with the liver. The discovery has surprised the scientists, and they say that it may help our understanding of how skin diseases can affect the rest of the body.

Professor Susanne Mandrup and her research group in collaboration with Nils Færgeman's research group at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Southern Denmark was actually studying something completely different when they made the groundbreaking discovery: That the skin, which is the body's largest organ, can "talk" to the liver.

"We have showed that the skin affects the metabolism in the liver, and that is quite a surprise," say Susanne Mandrup and Ditte Neess, a former student in the Mandrup research group and now laboratory manager in Professor Nils Færgeman's group.

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Primitive Eye, Tiny Liver Grown in the Lab

Japanese scientists claim to have coaxed stem cells to develop into a rudimentary human liver, replete with working blood vessels and the ability to metabolize. At the same time, another group in Japan reports the growth from stem cells of a precursor of a human eyeball.

Both feats were presented at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Yokohama, Japan, last week. Although further progress is needed before fully functional lab-grown livers and eyes will be ready to implant into a human, outside experts say the new results constitute genuine advances in that direction — and they have other medical uses in the meantime.

Takanori Takebe, a stem-cell biologist at Yokohama City University in Japan, and his team grew a small, rudimentary liver using a recipe of just three types of cells. The trick was figuring out when to introduce each ingredient into the mix of cells: "It took over a year and hundreds of trials," Takebe was quoted as saying in Nature.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/21112-eye-liver-lab-organs.html