Design Squad
Artificial Liver
Clip: Season 1 Episode 8 | 1m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
Dr. Howard Pryor develops an implantable device designed to help people suffering.
Dr. Howard Pryor develops an implantable device designed to help people suffering from liver disease.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Design Squad
Artificial Liver
Clip: Season 1 Episode 8 | 1m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
Dr. Howard Pryor develops an implantable device designed to help people suffering from liver disease.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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>> I'm Howard Pryor.
I'm a tissue engineer and a doctor, and I'm working on a device to replace sick livers at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The liver is right here, and it's responsible, by most people's account, for about 5,000 different functions in the body, and a human being can't live without one of these.
We have to actually design a device that will support living liver cells.
It has to get blood in.
Blood has to come out.
What we are going to do is take this piece of the liver out and find all the good cells in there and have them grow out into a large population of cells and put that into this device.
We're going to connect this device to the vein that brings all the blood from the intestines and connect it here to the vein that runs back to the heart.
The blood will flow just like it would have done if it were going through the liver, and the cells inside will have a chance to process all the blood, just like the normal liver would do.
In the United States, about 43,000 people have liver disease.
If this thing works, we will make a lot of sick people totally better.
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