Jan. 27, 2010 Researchers at MIT and Rockefeller University have
successfully grown hepatitis C virus in otherwise healthy liver
cells in the laboratory, an advance that could allow scientists
to develop and test new treatments for the disease. About 200
million people worldwide are infected with hepatitis C, which
can lead to liver failure or cancer, and existing drugs are not
always effective. To develop better treatments, researchers need
to test them in laboratory experiments in liver cells, but it
has been difficult to create a suitable tissue model because
healthy liver cells tend to lose their liver functions when
removed from the body. Previously, researchers have been able to
induce cancerous liver cells to survive and reproduce outside
the body, but those cells are not sufficient for studying
hepatitis C because their responses to infection are different
from those of normal liver cells. Now, Bhatia, in collaboration
with Charles Rice of the Rockefeller University, has developed a
way to maintain li