Meritxell Huch

Meritxell Huch is a stem cell biologist who established long-term expanding organoid cultures of adult human liver, enabling unprecedented study of hepatic progenitor cells and liver cancer biology. Her liver organoid system recapitulates ductal hepatocyte progenitor cells that can give rise to both hepatocellular carcinoma and cholangiocarcinoma, providing a model system to study cancer stem cell transitions in liver cancer. Huch has used organoids to identify LGR5 as a hepatic progenitor marker activated after liver injury and to model oncogenic transformation from normal to malignant hepatic progenitor cells. Her technologies are widely used for cancer drug screening and patient-derived liver cancer modeling.