Piia Lassila
Researcher in Jukka Hakkola's pharmacology group at the University of Oulu who led a clinical and mouse study showing that activating the drug sensor PXR makes the liver grow
Research Unit of Biomedicine and Internal Medicine, Biocenter Oulu, University of Oulu and Oulu University Hospital (affiliation on PubMed papers from 2025 to 2026)
Piia Lassila is the first author of LASSILA2026. The study gave the antibiotic rifampicin, which strongly activates the liver's drug-sensing receptor PXR, to 16 healthy volunteers for a week, and measured liver size. The liver grew by about 2.7 percent relative to body weight. In male mice, activating PXR also enlarged the liver, and the growth came with more activity in the AKT-MTOR pathway, the cell's main growth-signalling route, without activation of the YAP pathway. This matters because many common medicines activate PXR, and it shows that such drugs can change the size of a human organ within days.
PubMed lists Lassila on two papers, both from Jukka Hakkola's group at the University of Oulu. In the other, from 2025, she was a co-author of the discovery that the cell-adhesion protein Lasp2 is a new PXR target gene in mouse liver.
No official profile was found, so training and current position beyond the University of Oulu affiliation are not given.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | H | Pregnane X receptor-mediated liver growth: a controlled clinical trial in healthy volunteers and identification of the role of AKT-MTOR pathway in mouse. LASSILA2026 First author: a week of rifampicin enlarged the liver in healthy volunteers, and PXR activation in mice grew the liver with higher AKT-MTOR activity. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 2
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Piia Lassila.
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- Jukka Hakkola Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oulu who studies the pregnane X receptor (PXR), a liver sensor of drugs and foreign chemicals, and how it changes liver growth and metabolism
- Outi Kummu Studies how chemicals activate the nuclear receptor PXR and disturb metabolism; co-author of the study linking PXR-driven liver growth to the AKT-mTOR pathway.
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