A Vet Lab Got the Wrong Answer. It May Have Saved Human Lives

An MSU veterinary researcher set out to confirm what everyone already believed about liver regeneration. The data said no. What came next is a lesson in what One Health research is actually supposed to look like.

By Vet Candy Editorial  |  June 2026  |  Research & One Health

Here's how science is supposed to work, even when it doesn't go according to plan.

A veterinary researcher at Michigan State University set out to confirm a widely held assumption about liver regeneration. His lab got the opposite result. Rather than chalk it up to a fluke or bury it, they followed the data — and that decision has now contributed to a clinical finding that could meaningfully reduce one of the most serious complications in liver surgery for human patients.

And somewhere further down the road, it may help dogs with liver tumors too.

The Setup: What Everyone Thought They Knew

The liver is extraordinary. It's one of the only organs in the body capable of regenerating after surgical removal — a property that makes partial hepatectomy (liver resection) possible and life-saving for patients with liver cancer and other serious liver disease.

But liver regeneration doesn't always go as expected. A significant subset of patients develop post-hepatectomy liver failure — the liver simply doesn't bounce back the way it should. It's one of the leading causes of death after liver surgery, and there's currently no reliable way to prevent it.

Dr. James Luyendyk, Albert C. and Lois E. Dehn Endowed Chair in Veterinary Medicine and associate dean for research at MSU's College of Veterinary Medicine, has spent years studying the intersection of blood clotting and liver biology. His lab's focus turned to plasminogen — a protein involved in breaking down blood clots — which existing research suggested played an important role in liver regeneration after surgery.

The plan was to confirm what previous studies had established, then build on it.

The Plot Twist

When Luyendyk's team reduced plasminogen levels in mice following surgery, they expected to see impaired liver regeneration. Instead, the liver produced more new cells and showed signs of stronger regeneration.

"We had a hypothesis based on years of published research. Not only was the hypothesis wrong, the result was essentially the opposite of what we anticipated," said Luyendyk.

That's a genuinely uncomfortable place to be as a scientist. You've built a research program on a foundation that your own data just undercut. The easy move is to question the experiment. The harder move — and the right one — is to follow the data.

"Science moves forward when you're willing to follow the data, even when it tells you you're wrong," Luyendyk said. "In this case, the data challenged what we thought we knew about liver regeneration and opened an entirely new path for investigation."

Where Human Medicine Enters the Picture

The MSU findings caught the attention of Dr. Patrick Starlinger, a liver surgeon and researcher at Mayo Clinic involved in a multicenter clinical trial evaluating tranexamic acid (TXA) — a medication commonly used to reduce bleeding during surgery. TXA works, in part, by inhibiting the plasminogen pathway. Sound familiar?

Starlinger's team began to wonder: if plasminogen suppression enhanced liver regeneration in Luyendyk's mouse model, could TXA — by acting on that same pathway — improve liver recovery in human surgical patients?

They examined outcomes from the HeLiX trial, a multicenter clinical study, and the results were striking.

Patients who received TXA had roughly three times lower odds of developing post-hepatectomy liver failure than those who received a placebo.

"When we saw the findings from the MSU team, we realized there might be an important connection between this pathway and liver regeneration," said Starlinger. "Their experimental work provided the hypothesis that led us to examine patient outcomes in the HeLiX trial. Without those findings, we likely would not have pursued this question. The possibility that a widely available, low-cost medication could substantially reduce this risk is exciting because it has the potential to improve outcomes for patients undergoing surgery for liver cancer and other serious liver diseases."

Why This Is a Veterinary Story Too

Liver surgery isn't just for humans. Dogs are diagnosed with primary hepatic tumors and metastatic liver disease at meaningful rates, and hepatic resection is a real surgical option for select canine patients. Post-operative liver failure is a known risk in veterinary surgical patients as well.

The research pipeline that runs from a vet school lab to a human clinical trial doesn't run in just one direction. Luyendyk and his collaborators are explicit about this: discoveries that improve outcomes in human liver surgery create a knowledge base that can eventually be applied back to veterinary patients.

"This is exactly the kind of cross-species learning that One Health is all about," Luyendyk said. "We learn something in one setting, test it in another and use those insights to improve health across species."

TXA is already in clinical use. It's widely available and relatively inexpensive. If further research supports its use in surgical liver patients — human and animal — the barrier to adoption is low. That's not nothing.

What One Health Actually Looks Like in Practice

One Health gets invoked a lot. It's easy to slap the label on a project because it involves more than one species. What's rarer — and what this study actually represents — is a genuine bidirectional exchange where veterinary medicine generates a discovery that shapes human clinical practice, with the explicit expectation that the learning flows back.

Luyendyk's lab wasn't studying liver disease in dogs. It was doing basic science in a mouse model to answer a fundamental biological question. That basic science, published in the journal Blood, ended up in the hands of a liver surgeon at Mayo Clinic who was running a human clinical trial — and changed the direction of that trial.

That's the pipeline working as intended.

The Bottom Line

Post-hepatectomy liver failure kills people. It also kills dogs. If a cheap, widely available medication can cut those odds by two-thirds, that matters enormously — and the path to that discovery ran directly through a veterinary medicine research lab.

Additional studies are needed before TXA becomes standard of care for liver surgery patients. But the direction is clear, the mechanism is plausible, and the drug is already on the shelf.

"Every answer produces more important questions, and this study was no different," said Luyendyk. "We followed the data, even when it contradicted what everyone expected. Now we're seeing the possibility that those discoveries could improve outcomes for patients. That's incredibly exciting."

It's also a reminder of what happens when you don't bury an uncomfortable result.

Read the Research

Original MSU story: New discovery reshapes understanding of liver repair — MSUToday

Published in: Blood — Journal of the American Society of Hematology

MSU College of Veterinary Medicine: cvm.msu.edu

HeLiX Trial (Tranexamic Acid in Liver Surgery): Search ClinicalTrials.gov for HeLiX