Reprogramming

A variety of tissue lineages can be differentiated from pluripotent stem cells by mimicking embryonic development through stepwise exposure to morphogens, or by conversion of one differentiated cell type into another by enforced expression of master transcription factors. Here, to yield functional human haematopoietic stem cells, we perform morphogen-directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into haemogenic endothelium followed by screening of 26 candidate haematopoietic stem-cell-specifying transcription factors for their capacity to promote multi-lineage haematopoietic engraftment in mouse hosts...

Reprogramming healthy somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with four defined factors (Oct4, Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4) has been intensively investigated. However, reprogramming diseased cells such as cancer cells has fallen much behind. In this issue of Oncogene, Zhang et al. demonstrated that reprogrammed sarcoma cells with defined factors, as well as Nanog and Lin28, lost their tumorigenicity and dedifferentiated to mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) and hematopoietic stem cell (HSC)-like cells that can be terminally differentiated into mature connective tissues and red blood cells, suggesting sarcoma cells may be reversed back to a stage of common ancestor iPSC bifurcating for HSC and MSC ontogeny...

INTRODUCTION: Cancer is a disease with genetic and epigenetic origins, and the possible effects of reprogramming cancer cells using the defined sets of transcription factors remain largely uninvestigated. In the handful of publications available so far, findings have shown that reprogramming cancer cells changed the characteristics of the cells to differ from the parental cancer cells. These findings indicated the possibility of utilizing reprogramming technology to create a disease model in the laboratory to be used in studying the molecular pathogenesis or for drug screening of a particular cancer model...

Chromatin dynamics have been the major focus of many physiological and pathological processes over the past 20 years. Epigenetic mechanisms have been shown to be reshaped during both cellular reprogramming and tumorigenesis. For this reason, cancer cell reprogramming can provide a powerful tool to better understand both regenerative and cancer-fate processes, with a potential to develop novel therapeutic approaches. Recent studies showed that cancer cells can be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state by the overexpression of reprogramming transcription factors...