Nanomaterials in Liver Regeneration: The Prospect for Application

Hepatocyte transplantation has been proved an effective method to help liver regeneration by replacing host deficient cells caused by various disorders or injuries. However, several problems existing in hepatocyte transplantation have limited the clinical application of the technology. These problems include limited survival time of transplanted cells, immune rejection in xenotransplantation and insufficient transplantation efficiency. The rapid development of nanotechnology provides an opportunity for solving these problems. Application of nanomaterials in liver regeneration has been frequently reported recently. According to these researches, nanomaterials have advantages on the aspects of helping cell adhesion and growth, maintaining cell function and inducing cell differentiation. What is more, nanomaterials also exhibited its advantage on cell migration tracking, thus could help to monitor the cells transplantation and noninvasive diagnosis. For the further application of nanomaterials in liver regeneration, a complete understanding of current progress will be necessary and helpful. Our goal in this review is to summarize the current status of the applications of nanomaterials in hepatocyte transplantation. We will focus on nanomaterials that acted as scaffolds for hepatocyte growth and function maintenance, delivery cargo for improving hepatocyte transplantation and trackers for in vivo monitoring.