According to a study published in the Reviewed Preprint in eLife, neutrophils engulf and kill liver cells undergoing apoptosis, a process referred to by the authors of the study as "perforocytosis." The findings of the study showed that the removal of liver cells that have undergone apoptosis is a function of a type of white blood cell typically linked to immunological responses to foreign particles.

This finding can be used to design novel treatment approaches to treat human autoimmune liver disease (AIL), which may be a result of a neutrophil deficiency. According to the co-lead author, Mr. Luyang Cao, an associate investigator in the Department of Neurosurgery at the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy and Cancer Centre, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, China, "apoptotic cells are well characterized, but they are not often found within human samples, possibly because they are removed so efficiently by phagocytes."

The team extracted cells from the liver tissue of individuals with tumors brought on by hepatocellular carcinoma or hepatic hemangiomas to identify the phagocytes in charge of eliminating apoptotic cells in the liver. To identify which cells in the sample were apoptotic, they used two distinct staining methods.

The team found that up to 22 neutrophils were present in each of the 281 apoptotic liver cells from the livers of 32 individuals. The removal of apoptotic liver cells has historically been attributed to a class of phagocytes known as Kupffer cells; however, the researchers discovered that there were relatively few Kupffer cells in the samples.

The researchers proposed a new mechanism called perforocytosis based on the findings after they saw that neutrophils penetrated and eliminated dead liver cells in the study models, which was consistent with their findings in human samples. 

(Source: https://theprint.in/health/study-reveals-white-blood-cells-role-in-clearing-out-dead-liver-cells-2/1497580/ )