Growing livers to save lives

Sunday April 13, 2014

Reporter: Derryn Hinch

Producer: Richard Andrews

MARK FERGUSON: OK, I am going to say this as straight as I can — all of us have to learn to love our livers. And that doesn't mean you can't enjoy a drink. What it does mean is that you'll enjoy a longer, healthier life -especially if you follow the simple tips you're about to see. Of course, no-one knows the importance of the liver better than Derryn Hinch. Recently, he flew to Japan to check outa remarkable breakthrough involving a brilliant scientist and his lab full of mice growing tiny human livers on their brains.

DERRYN HINCH: Brent Sternberg is living on borrowed time. His eyes and skin are yellow because his liver is dying and it's no longer able to efficiently rid his body of toxins.

DOCTOR: Alright, let's have a look at the tummy.

DERRYN HINCH: For Brent, this is the second time it's happened. So this is from the old transplant in '96.

BRENT: Yep.In 1996,

DERRYN HINCH: When he was three, the liver he was born with failed him.

BRENT: Yeah, just went into acute failure.

DERRYN HINCH: Brent has always known that someday, he would need another transplant. For the past nine months, he has been on the transplant waiting list. The yellower he gets, the sicker he's becoming Skin becomes very yellow, doesn't it? Oh, it can.

DOCTOR: And, in fact, the entire body — if you looked inside the organs, the organs become yellow.

DERRYN HINCH: It's estimated 6 million Australians have liver problems and most are self-inflicted. It's the way we live life these days -alcohol, high-fat diets and hepatitis are the main culprits. Everything you put in your mouth goes into the gut and goes straight from the gut to the liver and the liver gets first divvy up of anything that goes into your mouth, t has to handle it. It's the organ that is prepared to decontaminate us and excrete our waste products.

DERRYN HINCH: This is a very personal story for me and it started in bars like this. Much of my life has been spent here, decades and decades of drinking. I used to joke when people asked,"What about your liver?"I'd say "It died in 1964".

Well, the joke was on me because probably, that's when things started to go wrong. I did a rough calculation recently. I reckon before I was told to stop, I'd drunk 18,000 litres of alcohol -enough to fill a pool this size.

At my worst, I was drinking three bottles a day, every day. Alcohol, of course, can lead to cirrhosis of the liver. Explain to me what cirrhosis really is?

DOCTOR: Well, cirrhosis really is a Greek term just for scarring, it just means a scarred liver. So one of the processes of damage that happens in the liver is this repeated damage from alcohol results in the liver trying to heal itself and that results in scarring and a bit like a scar you might get in a wound. And that scarring eventually replaces the liver and it becomes one big scar with just a few functioning liver cells scattered in the middle of it. In 2005, I was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver.

DERRYN HINCH: How close did I come to dying?

DOCTOR: Well, we were very conscious that you were well known and we didn't want to have people saying to us,"Derryn Hinch jumped the queue" so I think, in some ways, it was a detriment to you. We were very conscious of keeping you on the backburner and making sure you paid your dues. And we thought we might have just left it a little late and that you might, then, you know...Well, if we transplanted you that you would survive a year or two at best.

DERRYN HINCH: Just over two years ago, I was in this very room. Not standing here but lying there, having a life-saving liver transplant. It's a surreal experience to be here and see this amazing surgical team perform that operation This was my liver -yellow, cancer-ridden, eyond repair. The pathologist who showed me my old liver, he said once you got it out and had a good look at it, he thought I probably had about two weeks left.

DOCTOR: Well, I must admit you looked better than your liver did, Derryn, I must admit. Alcohol's one of the main toxins for the liver so if you look at the community at large, it's certainly one of the main causes of liver damage.

DERRYN HINCH: You're much younger than me but it seems to me that binge-drinking among young people is more prevalent now than it was in my days.

DOCTOR: Anecdotally, just from my own experience with life and children and my kids, you know, I agree with you. I do think it's a very different pattern of drinking to say, when we were younger and went out drinking, and certainly, more younger women are drinking, and drinking more.

DERRYN HINCH: So if I - generally, though -if I say you have 10 drinks in a big binge session, it's going to take you at least 10 hours for that to go through your liver?

DOCTOR: I think that's a pretty reasonable estimate if you're still standing at the end of that.

DERRYN HINCH: So in an ideal world, we wouldn't drink alcohol at all, would we?

DOCTOR: Well, you know, Derryn, you know, you think, there are some advantages...I can't believe I'm saying this! You go home at night stressed, glass of wine, it can, you know, maybe perhaps it maybe help some people, you know, live a little longer, perhaps. I think it's the excess, it's when it becomes excessive, and that's when the damage happens.

DERRYN HINCH: In all stories about the liver, what's often forgotten is just how resilient it is despite the battering it gets. If you took a couple of days a week off, no drinking at all...

DOCTOR: Yes.....alcohol-free days. Yeah, that does give your liver a little chance to recover and regenerate and not have this toxin constantly poisoning the system.

DERRYN HINCH: Here are some simple steps I wished I'd followed -add lemon juice and green tea to your diet to help flush the toxins, garlic, beetroot, apples, carrots, avocados and cabbage will have your liver loving you. And, for a good liver cleansing, leafy green vegetables work just fine.

But, as I well know, there can come a time when too much damage has been done and there is nothing that can be done, short of a transplant. Yet even then, for some, the grip of the grog is stronger than their will to live.

GEORGE BEST: I know people who have been off it for 20 years and gone back on it, 30 years, and gone back on it. The only way to stop it is if alcohol didn't exist. But it does.

DERRYN HINCH: George Best was the first of the superstar soccer players -a football freak who began playing for Manchester United in 1963when he was 17 years old. Alex was his second wife. Now, Alex, you were 22, a beautiful young model, did you know what you were letting yourself in for?

ALEX: Um, no. In a nutshell, no. I used to go into pubs where George used to drink and I literally actually tried to beg people to not serve him.

DERRYN HINCH: Then, it was obvious that his liver disease was so bad that he needed a transplant.

ALEX:It was chronic, yes.

DERRYN HINCH: And he finally got one in 2002.

ALEX: 2002, yeah.

GEORGE BEST: I'm not drinking, and that's it. But having said that, it doesn't mean that I won't be drinking tomorrow because no-one can answer that or say that.

DERRYN HINCH: But within a year, he was drinking again, wasn't he?

ALEX: Yeah.

DERRYN HINCH: You knew that by doing that, he was killing himself.

ALEX: Yeah. I could just see it was all downhill from there. After going through that big operation and accepting someone else's liver, if he wasn't going to stop then, he was never going to stop at all.

DERRYN HINCH: And he was only 59?

ALEX: 59 years old, so young.

BRENT: If I went out and drank one beer tonight, it would kill me.

DERRYN HINCH: So when you know all the things your liver does and how important it is to you, does it make you think how crazy people are, the way they abuse it?

BRENT: Uh, yes.

DERRYN HINCH: Worldwide, there's a desperate shortage of donor livers. But there may be hope. Here in Japan, a brilliant young scientist may hold the key.

So this is where you did all the experiments to start with?

PROFESSOR TAKABE: Yes, these are the mouse who received the transplants. OK.

DERRYN HINCH: It's extraordinary to think that we're standing here, holding something that in 20 years' time may be the forerunner of a whole transplanted liver. Right, right. Using human stem cells, Professor Takabe has been able to create tiny human livers. Then, he's implanted them inside the brains of mice. He choose the brain as the host organ because he could monitor what was happening through a glass cap. Remarkably, the little livers began growing.

The green on that screen, that's the implanted liver material, correct?

TAKABE: Right.

DERRYN HINCH: And since you've implanted them they've grown their own blood flow?

TAKABE: Right, right, correct.

DERRYN HINCH: And does that mean that liver will grow even more?

TAKABE: Right. So after this, they will periforate and get maturate into the functional liver cells.

DERRYN HINCH: It's early days but one day, millions of lives could be saved. It's incredible, it is incredible. I tell you,to stand here as a person who, through early research, has had a liver transplant and now to be standing here with you and looking at the next phase, which, this is the next phase, um, boy, that's...That's mind-blowing. That is just incredible.

DERRYN HINCH: I know how lucky I am. I want others to learn from my mistakes. So for God's sake, treat your liver like it was your lover. Be gentle and kind. It is so important as Brent well knows. Just before Christmas, a donor liver was found.

His transplant went ahead. He's still getting better but look at this. These were his eyes then,these are them now. Good on you, mate.

BRENT: To be the same colour as everybody else now is a really nice feeling.

I couldn't imagine being any happier to be honest.
You know, just happy to be alive.

MARK FERGUSON: And a special thanks to Professor Bob Jones and his team at Melbourne's Austin Hospital who hope, as we do, that more Australians register as organ donors.