Abstract: Treatment for end-stage organ failure is restricted by the critical shortage of donor organs with the organ waiting list currently at 100,000 requests and it is increasing by 5% every year. In the case of liver, about 4,000 people die in US while waiting for a transplantable organ, and the lack of donor organs is considered a major health crisis. We previously demonstrated that ischemic whole rat livers can be decellularized to create an whole-liver scaffold, that adult hepatocytes can be seeded into these scaffolds, and that these recellularized auxiliary grafts can be transplanted short term. Here, we report the first human tissue engineered liver graft prepared by recellularization of decellularized discarded cadaveric human livers. Five human livers rejected for transplantation were perfusion decellularized and defatted to make whole liver scaffolds.Figure: No Caption available.The process preserved the vascular bed within the scaffold as evidenced by computed tomography scanning. Histological and biochemical analyses revealed that the collagen and glycosaminoglycan content in the scaffold remained unchanged while DNA and fat were significantly removed after decellularization.Figure: No Caption available.Preliminary experiments confirmed the feasibility of repopulation of decellularized human liver scaffolds with primary human hepatocytes. Further experiments to evaluate the hepatic function of human liver grafts are underway. This study is the first to report construction of human liver grafts for transplantation. The results of this work bring the field of liver tissue engineering one step closer to clinical translation.