UAMS Researcher Awarded $1.6M to Study Liver Repair

A file file photo of Mitch McGill (photo provided by UAMS)

UAMS researcher and associate professor Mitch McGill has received a $1.64 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to examine the fundamental molecular mechanisms of liver repair.

McGill is leading a study that aims to understand how phosphatidic acid activates, or promotes, liver repair after acetaminophen-induced liver injury.  According to McGill, acute liver failure most commonly results from overdose of the drug acetaminophen.

“Acute liver failure is a rare, devastating condition with strikingly high mortality,” McGill said in a statement. “Currently, the only life-saving treatment is a liver transplant. But there’s a shortage of healthy donor livers, which is a major public health problem. Even those patients who receive a liver transplant, risk numerous life-threatening complications such as organ rejection. We want to develop new treatments to help acute liver failure patients.”

The research team includes D. Keith Williams, professor of biostatistics, who serves as co-investigator; Andrew J. Morris, professor in the College of Medicine Department of Pharmacology and research career scientist at the Central Arkansas VA Healthcare System; and Brian N. Finck, professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

The NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases is funding the project, which launched in March and will continue through February 2029.

McGill’s previous research has revealed that the lipid phosphatidic acid may enhance liver regeneration. He’s optimistic that the team can develop info that will help the medical community understand molecular mechanisms of liver repair and how the lipid helps with acute liver failure.

“No other organ in the human body has the same capacity for self-repair,” McGill said. “If we can understand how it repairs itself, then we can create new therapeutics that will kick that process into high gear and improve transplant-free survival in those patients whose livers are not naturally so good at it, or who have such severe injury that the liver needs a little help to start the repair process.”