Thirty-four-year-old Mari-Jo Fraser has a passion for baseball. Not just watching the game, but playing it hard—and exceedingly well. In fact, she loves the game so much she even celebrated her wedding day on the mound. This year, she made the second-to-final cut of the 2006 USA Baseball Women’s National Team, which competed in Taiwan at the Women’s World Cup. And she vows she’ll compete again when team tryouts are held next in 2008.

So three years ago, when she started feeling lousy during a game, she still played through nine innings.

“I thought I had the flu or was just dehydrated,” says the mother of two.
Fraser had gone to the doctor the day before her game, feeling nauseous, suspecting she was pregnant or under the weather—except her eyes were looking very yellow. After returning home and taking some prescribed medication, she immediately became violently sick. Her husband rushed her to the emergency room.

“I felt like I was dying,” Fraser says. And, it turns out, she was.

Fraser was suffering from acute liver failure, which strikes suddenly and unexpectedly with hard-to-diagnose symptoms and confusing causes. This uncommon but life-threatening condition can occur in people with no apparent previous illness, making them critically ill very rapidly due to sudden, severe liver cell damage. Known causes include viruses, medications such as acetaminophen or antibiotics, poisoning, heat stroke and pregnancy. Patients require liver transplants and, even then, the survival rate is only about 10 percent.

When Fraser slipped into a coma, her doctors knew that in order to survive she would need a liver transplant—and soon.

Two days after she was put on the transplant list at the University of Washington Medical Center she received a donor organ.

Today, as a healthy competitive baseball player and mother of two young boys, Fraser is well aware of how close she came to dying.

“I was lucky,” she admits. “It’s pretty emotional thinking of where I’ve been and where I am now.”

But for every patient like Mari-Jo, there are 18 who die each day across the U.S. waiting for a donor organ, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The need for transplant tissues and organs far outpaces the supply from donors.

New research could signal hope for future liver patients. Recent ground-breaking discoveries in the pathology labs of the University of Washington could eventually lead to a revolutionary new way of repairing damaged livers using stem cells.

For the first time, a team of UW researchers has isolated, grown and injected human liver stem cells into laboratory mice using a technique that could hold the key to repairing livers severely damaged by hepatitis, alcoholism, drug overdoses—and perhaps even acute liver failure.
“This is a major first step in learning how to repair damaged human livers with stem cells,” says Pathology Chair Nelson Fausto, who led the research.

Stem cells have remarkable potential. Serving as a repair system for the body, they can theoretically divide without limit to replenish other cells. When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the potential either to remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a more specialized function, such as a liver cell, a red blood cell or a heart muscle cell.