One of The World's Worst Parasites May Hide an Amazing Healing Effect - ScienceAlert

Amazingly, infected armadillos' grew more liver – their organs became perfectly supersized.

"If we can identify how bacteria grow the liver as a functional organ without causing adverse effects in living animals, we may be able to translate that knowledge to develop safer therapeutic interventions to rejuvenate aging livers and to regenerate damaged tissues," explains University of Edinburgh cell biologist Anura Rambukkana.

leprae seems to be reprogramming adult liver cells, hepatocytes, by converting them into a stem-cell-like state, allowing all the extra liver tissues to grow correctly from them.

While human livers do have the capacity to regrow at least in part – the only internal organ that can do so – even with repeated inflammatory injury of chronic liver disease, they accumulate damage over time, leaving millions of people succumbing to chronic liver diseases each year.