Human Embryonic Stem Cell-derived Expandable Hepatic Organoids Enable Pathophysiological Model of Alcoholic Liver Injury

We report the generation of human pluripotent-stem-cell-derived (hPSC), expandable hepatic organoids (hEHOs) using a newly established method that consists of subjecting hPSCs to a sequence of distinct wholly defined (serum-free, feeder free) media lineage restricting the cells to become determined hepatic stem cells followed by a process of shifting the cells from monolayer (2D) to organoid (3D ) cultures. The hEHOs stably keep phenotypic features of a bi-potent hepatic lineage that can differentiate into functional hepatocytes or cholangiocytes. The hEHOs can expand for over 20 passages enabling industrial scaling to amounts requisite for industry or clinical programs. The cells from culture are able to engraft rapidly into injured liver parenchyma of FRG mice following transplantation and to differentiate in vivo into mature hepatocytes. If implanted into the epididymis fat pads of immune-deficiency mice, they do not generate non-hepatic lineages nor teratomas. We further developed a derivative model by incorporating human fetal liver mesenchymal cells (hFLMCs) into the hEHOs, referred as hFLMC/hEHO, and used the organoids to model alcohol liver disease-associated pathophysiologic changes, such as oxidative stress generation, steatosis, inflammatory mediators release and fibrosis, following treatment with alcohol. Our work demonstrates that the hFLMC/hEHO provide a novel ex vivo pathophysiological model for studying alcohol liver disease as well as many other non-genetic liver diseases. evaluation of whole transcriptome of 7 cell types, each of them include 2 replication