Don’t worry, it’ll grow back!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
For patients needing organ transplants, the wait can take years. But what if we could grow organs… on a dish??
Amy Stoddard [Amy STOD-urd] and team at Harvard University did just that! They identified signaling molecules that activate and grow liver cells on demand. Then, they implanted the lab-grown tissue in mice.
Just one week after activating the tissue, it increased in size by five hundred percent! Even better? No tumor growth, or negative effects on animal health or behavior. Further research is needed to test long-term function, though this is a promising first step.
But that’s not an excuse to grow out your rat tail again!
Reference: Stoddard, A. E., Kumar, V., Tzouanas, C. N., Hui, V., Li, J., Jain, A., Farrell, A., Bhatia, S. N., & Chen, C. S. (2026). Synthetic Control of Implanted Engineered Liver Tissue Growth. bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology, 2025.12.10.693527. https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.10.693527