SummaryOrganoid technologies have become a powerful emerging tool to model liver diseases, for drug screening, and for personalized treatments. These applications are, however, limited in their capacity to generate functional hepatocytes in a reproducible and efficient manner. Here, we generated and characterized the hepatic organoid (eHEPO) culture system using human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived EpCAM-positive endodermal cells as an intermediate. eHEPOs can be produced within 2 weeks and expanded long term (>16 months) without any loss of differentiation capacity to mature hepatocytes. Starting from patient-specific iPSCs, we modeled citrullinemia type 1, a urea cycle disorder caused by mutations in the argininosuccinate synthetase (ASS1) enzyme. The disease-related ammonia accumulation phenotype in eHEPOs could be reversed by the overexpression of the wild-type ASS1 gene, which also indicated that this model is amenable to genetic manipulation. Thus, eHEPOs are excellent unlimited cell sources to generate functional hepatic organoids in a fast and efficient manner.
To date, the single-incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS) technique has been applied to a wide range of general surgical procedures; however, there are still scant data and debates on adrenal procedures. The aim of this study was to compare surgical outcomes of single-incision versus laparoscopic multiport adrenalectomy. The patients were divided into 2 study groups on the basis of the surgical approach: SILS (group 1) and multiport laparoscopic surgery (group 2). Patient demographics and their perioperative and postoperative results were evaluated retrospectively from the medical records. A total of 80 patients were included in the study. There were 44 patients in group 1 and 36 patients in group 2. The average operative time, estimated blood loss, and tumor size were similar between the study groups. There were no mortalities in both groups and the mean duration of hospital stay was 3 days for both groups. Without using any single-incision access trocars and articulated instrumentation, we achieved the same surgical outcomes in our SILS adrenalectomy series compared with conventional multiport laparoscopy series in terms of postoperative short-term outcomes and cost-effectivity.
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