When Ellie Brogan was just a day old, doctors warned her parents that she would probably need a liver transplant or die by her first birthday. Ellie was born missing a fraction of her small intestine and some of her colon.

Two and a half years later, Ellie is one of more than 100 children with "short bowel syndrome" who have received a therapy pioneered at Children's Hospital Boston. It uses fish oil to keep their livers healthy, and doctors and Ellie's parents say it helped save her life.

Babies like Ellie lack the ability to digest food or absorb nutrients. They need to be fed intravenously, but the IV nutrition can also damage their livers. But experiments recently showed that using a nutritional supplement made with fish oil instead of the standard one, made from soybean oil, did not cause liver damage.

So far, 112 children at Children's Hospital have been given the fish oil. The treatment is now available at 70 hospitals around the world. Although the data have not yet been published, more than 90 percent of the Children's Hospital patients are alive -- a remarkable rate for this serious illness, especially considering that the hospital often sees children who arrive from elsewhere in very bad shape.