Editorial
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jun 7, 2015; 21(21): 6427-6433
Published online Jun 7, 2015. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v21.i21.6427
Cell therapy from bench to bedside: Hepatocytes from fibroblasts - the truth and myth of transdifferentiation
Madhusudana Girija Sanal
Madhusudana Girija Sanal, Department of Radiation Oncology, Marion Bessin Liver Research Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461, United States
Author contributions: Sanal MG conceived the issues which formed the content of the manuscript and wrote the manuscript.
Supported by IIP fellowship (2013-2014), Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, through the generosity of the Gruss Lipper Family Foundation.
Conflict-of-interest: The author has no conflict of interests.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Madhusudana Girija Sanal, MBBS, PhD, Department of Radiation Oncology, Marion Bessin Liver Research Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Room 323, Ullmann Building, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, NY 10461, United States. sanalmg@gmail.com
Telephone: +1-347-3894440 Fax: +1-718-4303099
Received: December 4, 2014
Peer-review started: December 5, 2014
First decision: March 10, 2015
Revised: March 24, 2015
Accepted: May 7, 2015
Article in press: May 7, 2015
Published online: June 7, 2015
Core Tip

Core tip: Hepatocyte transplantation is an alternative for liver transplantation in chronic liver disease patients for a long term cure. There is a scarcity of donor liver and hepatocytes. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) derived hepatocytes and hepatocytes generated by transdifferentiation are two possibilities. iPSC derived hepatocytes often fail to engraft upon transplantation. We need to define methods to evaluate and compare efficiency of differentiation, standards and clear quality definition for hepatocyte like cells. More comprehensive analysis of the RNAs and proteome is required. Methods to compare and analyze the expression profiles, standards and references to be compared with need to be defined. There is a need for a well-coordinated global initiative comparable to the scale of the Human Genome Project to achieve this goal in the near future.