Professor Martin Yarmush and colleagues at the Massachusetts General Hospital have been awarded a 4-year $1,605,506 research grant from the National Institute of Health for a project entitled, "Recellularization of Liver Bioscaffolds." The project’s goal is to engineer transplantable human liver grafts for treating liver dysfunction and failure, and the central hypothesis to be tested here is that the natural liver scaffold derived from discarded livers can be extensively repopulated with hepatocytes and non-parenchymal cells and that these grafts can perform essential liver functions in vivo.