Background On Liver Therapies
Effective liver treatment provides a temporary response leading to one of two positive outcomes: adequate liver regeneration or successful liver transplantation. Therapies such as cross perfusion and various techniques for toxin absorption have been used; but to date, none has been shown to be clinically effective in providing significant liver function in patients with advanced liver disease.
Liver disease can occur as a primary condition or as a complication arising from other diseases, leading to a fragmented approach to treatment. Current treatments fall into five basic categories—diet, detoxification, drug therapies, surgical intervention, and transplantation—treatments which all suffer from the same problems of limited effectiveness and other significant drawbacks.
- Diet — Dietary treatment is often an important therapeutic element, but one that requires a patient’s total compliance with a strict and often complicated regimen. Such rigid compliance is difficult to maintain and therefore prone to failures.
- Detoxification — When utilizing forms of hemodialysis originally developed to treat kidney failure, detoxification is a difficult, unpleasant, complicated, and expensive process, and offers only limited success. Patients often abandon it due to the resulting discomfort, inconvenience, and low quality of life. Other forms of detoxification which induce vomiting or diarrhea have the same limitations, shortcomings, and outcomes.
- Drug therapies — Such as interferon, targeted toward the reduction or elimination of the hepatitis virus, provide long-term benefits to only a small proportion of hepatitis B or C patients, but offer no benefits to patients experiencing acute liver decompensation or suffering from other liver diseases such as alcoholic cirrhosis. And once again, patients often do not comply well with their drug regimens due to the unpleasant side effects.
- Surgical interventions — These procedures treat only symptoms or byproducts of liver disease. The most common procedure is a portocaval shunt to divert main bloodstream from the digestive tracts to the liver into the body cavity. Others include removal of accumulated abdominal fluids or removal of an enlarged or damaged spleen caused by reduced or impaired liver function. Surgical interventions are costly and generally require extended ICU and hospital stays.
- Transplantation — Transplantation remains the most effective overall treatment for acute liver failure. However, even with the increasingly stringent eligibility criteria for prospective recipients, their numbers far exceed the supply of available donor organs. Annually, approximately 1/3 of those on waiting lists will receive a new liver. For those patients lucky enough to get a new liver, it marks the beginning of an expensive lifelong regimen of anti-rejection medication. And, while effective in restoring liver function, transplantation may not address the underlying causes of the liver failure.
The need for a more effective and efficient artificial liver device is urgent and growing, and HepaHope believes that its HepaPheresis™ System represents a significant improvement in addressing that need. HepaHope believes that the superior functionality of the HepaPheresis™ System will have the capability to keep a patient alive longer and more efficiently than current techniques until such time as a transplant becomes available or until the patient's own liver is regenerated.