New Artificial Liver Shows Promise

Oct. 17 -- Brandon Rice went to bed a normal 4-year-old, but woke up the next morning with yellow eyes and yellow skin. Within two weeks, the little boy lay in a hospital bed, hooked up to three dozen tubes and so bloated with fluid that he was twice his normal weight. The diagnosis: a malformed liver.

"He was a totally different kid, you wouldn't have believed it," remembers Brandon's mother, Melissa Rice. "It was awful, it didn't even look like him."

Doctors at the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor immediately added Brandon's name to the transplant list, a little life among thousands of patients with liver failure.

"His prognosis was poor; nearly 2,000 people die each year waiting — in vain — for a new liver," explains ABCNEWS' Medical Editor Dr. Timothy Johnson.

"In the intensive care unit, we have very good mechanical systems to replace the functions of the heart, the kidney, but never the liver," says Dr. Robert Bartlett, Brandon's doctor and division chief of surgical critical care. "So patients who were dying of liver failure, short of a transplant, there was nothing we could do for them."

In fact, Brandon's parents began to plan their little boy's funeral before a medical innovation made possible his recovery.

An ‘Artificial Liver’

For the more than 17,000 patients like Brandon, hope may now be on the horizon — thanks to a new and cutting-edge liver support system known as a Molecular Absorbent Recirculating System, or MARS.

This "artificial liver," developed in Germany, removes toxic substances from the blood that would normally be filtered out by a functioning liver.

The device transports a patient's blood to a filter where it is mixed with a sticky protein called albumin. The toxins in the blood attach to the albumin molecules, which then carry the poisons out of the blood, explains Dr. John Magee, assistant professor of surgery and a pediatric liver transplant surgeon at the University of Michigan.