Hepatocytes generated from human fibroblasts relieve liver failure

Severe liver diseases, such as liver cirrhosis, liver failure and cancer, threaten millions people each year. Though therapies like liver transplantation has been used for treatment of liver diseases, lack of liver donors significantly limits this application. Alternative approaches such as hepatocyte transplantation and bio-artificial liver devices were thus proposed. Nevertheless, these strategies compete with liver transplantation for donate organs. It is highly desirable to generate surrogate hepatocytes from non-liver cells.

Recently, the research group at Dr. HUI Lijian laboratory from the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a novel method to directly convert human fibroblasts to functional and expansible hepatocytes (hiHep cells). They introduced three liver enriched transcription factors into human fibroblasts, which induced liver gene expression and hepatic functions, including glycogen storage, secretion of ALBUMIN, metabolism of drugs and biliary excretion. Notably, hiHep cells are expandable and able to integrate into mouse livers and relieve liver failure. Thus hiHep cells provide a new source of functional hepatocytes.

This study entitled “Direct Reprogramming of Human Fibroblasts to Functional and Expandable Hepatocytes” was published online in Cell Stem Cell on Feb 28^th, 2014. This work was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China, and the National Science Foundation of China.

A schematic presentation of hepatic transdifferentiation. (Image by Prof. HUI Lijian’s group)