On a recent Thursday afternoon, researchers Lanuza Faccioli and Zhiping Hu wheeled an inconspicuous black and white plastic cooler from an operating room at a hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. Inside was a badly scarred liver, just removed from a 47-year-old man undergoing a transplant to receive a new one from a donor.
But what if patients could avoid that fate? Faccioli and Hu are part of a University of Pittsburgh team led by Alejandro Soto-Gutiérrez attempting to revive badly damaged livers like these—as well as kidneys, hearts, and lungs. Using messenger RNA, the same technology used in some of the Covid-19 vaccines, they’re aiming to reprogram terminally ill organs to