A NEW cell therapy could offer “real hope” to people living with advanced liver disease, according to the British Liver Trust.

The liver can heal itself after damage, but scarring – known as cirrhosis, which claims 11,000 lives a year in the UK – can put it beyond repair, causing liver failure and leaving few options but a transplant. 

The new treatment takes immune cells from patients’ blood and turns them into macrophages, which attack damaged or infected cells before re-injecting them back into the patient.

Trials have shown that after four years, 70 per cent of those on the therapy did not need a transplant compared with 40 per cent on standard treatment.

University of Edinburgh Institute for Regeneration and Repair’s Professor Stuart Forbes said: “We hope this type of approach could one day add to our treatment choices for patients with advanced liver disease, reducing the need for liver transplants.”

Welcoming the findings, British Liver Trust chief executive Pamela Healy said: “For people living with cirrhosis, these results offer something that has been in desperately short supply for far too long: real hope.”