TOWARD PERSONALIZED CELL THERAPIES: HUMAN PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS AS A RESEARCH AND THERAPEUTIC TOOL FOR LIVER DISEASES

Regenerative medicine aims to revive and restore vital functions of the organs injured by pathological or iatrogenic factors. Due to the scarcity in organ donors and limited regenerative capacity of tissue-residing stem cells, in vitro generation of patient-specific therapeutic cells holds an immense promise for treating various degenerative diseases, cancers, genetic defects and toxicity induced-organ failures (1). While granting the potential of autologous multipotent stem cells as compatible transplantation cellular resources, which have had been explored extensively by many research teams globally, these cells possess some shortcomings owning to their limited growth, differentiation capacities. Moreover, lack of an ideal research cellular tool hampered the development of an efficient in vitro differentiation culture system. Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) are able to replicate indefinitely in vitro (self-renewal) and can differentiate into cells of all three embryonic germ layers (pluripotent) that make up the adult organism. Owning to these characteristics, human PSCs are considered to be therapeutically valuable cellular resources. We have showed that epigenetic reprogramming using epigenetic modifiers are able to confer pluripotent state in multipotent stem cells without genetic modifications (1) which offers