Extracorporeal liver support
There is no machine that can do the work of a failing liver. NHS England says no practical artificial device is available to support one or replace it. A liver transplant is the only treatment that can save life.
Related
- Post-hepatectomy liver failure — is used to treat
- Liver transplantation — related through post-hepatectomy liver failure
- Liver resection — related through post-hepatectomy liver failure
- ISGLS PHLF grading — related through post-hepatectomy liver failure
What we have not established
Relationships involving Extracorporeal liver support that we have not evidenced are listed, never drawn — a line would read as a weak relationship, which is a different and false claim.
- None recorded for this concept.
Evidence search date: 2026-09-02
Content reviewed and approved
What we have not established here
Known gaps on this concept:
MACHINE PERFUSION IS DELIBERATELY ABSENT. Evidence that NICE recommends four ex-situ machine perfusion devices for NHS use, and that NHSBT has funded a national rollout of abdominal normothermic regional perfusion, was acquired and verified in this phase and is not rendered here. Those technologies act on a DONOR ORGAN before transplantation, not on the patient's own liver. An adversarial review found that placing them beside liver support devices would manufacture the impression that the NHS routinely funds machines that support failing livers. They belong to a transplantation concept that does not exist yet.
THE ISGLS POINTER IS NOT FULLY CLOSED, and closing it with this evidence would be an editorial inference dressed as a citation. The platform's post-hepatectomy liver failure concept cites ISGLS grade C, which names 'extracorporeal liver support' among its defining invasive procedures. Everything on this page concerns ACUTE liver failure (NICE, EASL 2017) or ACUTE-ON-CHRONIC liver failure (EASL 2023). Nothing held gives the status of any liver support modality in the post-hepatectomy setting, and nothing establishes that ISGLS's phrase denotes albumin dialysis at all.
No plain-language account of what these machines are. The plain layer carries one statement: that no practical artificial device is currently available. That is the honest answer to the question a family actually asks, and everything else on this page is about evidence status rather than about a treatment.
The NICE albumin dialysis guidance dates from 2009 and was last reviewed on publication - seventeen years before the Cochrane review cited here.
The ATMP regulatory material acquired this phase - the statutory definition of an advanced therapy medicinal product, the marketing authorisation requirement, and the hospital exemption conditions - is not rendered. It is legal scaffolding with no liver-specific content, and the hospital exemption in particular was flagged as readable by a determined reader as a route to access rather than as a restriction.
What has changed here
2026-09-02 — Concept created at plain, clinical, specialist and research resolutions - the platform's first concept to offer research depth.
Phase 17. The platform published the ISGLS grade C definition naming extracorporeal liver support and held nothing about it. This concept states what the UK bodies that decide have decided, and leads with the fact that no practical artificial device is currently available.