BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

A liver divided

March 20, 2014 7:00 AM UTC

Three separate teams have directly converted human fibroblasts to proliferative liver cells and thus eliminated a key drawback of using induced pluripotent stem cells to treat damaged livers-the inability of the resulting differentiated cells to repopulate damaged liver.1-3

Each team had a different twist on getting the cells to divide, but the common thread was that fibroblasts were directly programmed to cell states that are part of the hepatocyte differentiation pathway. Next steps could include taking the protocols' lentiviral manipulations out of the equation and further improving the maturation of the resulting hepatocytes...