Study: Interleukin-6 May Allow Use of "Fatty" Livers for Transplant

A drug already approved by the FDA for human testing may one day increase the number of cadaver livers useable for liver transplants, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Studying rats with fatty livers, the researchers reported in the journal Gastroenterology that bathing the livers in a human immune system protein called interleukin-6 (IL-6) rescued them from failure when transplanted into other rats.

Roughly 40 percent of adults in the United States have so-called "fatty" livers, which frequently fail to function at all or fail quickly when transplanted. Fatty livers generally stem from either diet or alcohol consumption.

"IL-6 really works," said Dr. Zhaoli Sun, researcher in the Department of Surgery. Sun cautioned that IL-6's ability to "rescue" fatty livers for transplantation needs to be tested in larger animals, such as pigs, before human studies are undertaken.

"IL-6 is already approved for use in humans, but it has many negative effects when injected," said Sun. "Fortunately, our technique stores the liver in IL-6 before it's transplanted, rather than giving IL-6 to the organ recipient, so side effects should be minimized."

In his experiments, Sun would remove a fatty liver from one animal, and before transplanting it into another, he would bathe the liver in a soup of nutrients that either did or did not include IL-6. Livers soaked in IL-6 had better blood flow and better function and allowed recipients to live, while fatty livers never exposed to IL-6 succumbed quickly to damage and never worked well enough to save their new hosts.

Other Sources: Johns Hopkins