About
All End-stage chronic liver diseases contribute to more than 170,000 deaths per year in Europe. Scarcity of donor livers has led to the development of novel approaches in regenerative medicine for the treatment of life-threatening liver diseases. The recent research from my group has shown the generation of functionally improved hepatocytes from human pluripotent stem cells via microRNA modulation (J Hepatol. 62(1):101-10, 2015). Furthermore, we have discovered a combination of transcription factors that reprograms fibrosis-causing cells into functional hepatocytes in vivo, leading to amelioration of liver fibrosis (Cell Stem Cell 18, 797-808, 2016). Thus, in vivo direct reprogramming of fibrotic cells into functional parenchymal cells has the promising potential to become an innovative treatment option for end-stage liver diseases. Additionally, this approach would be applicable to chronic diseases of other organs such as lung and kidney, thereby potentially helping millions of patients, world-wide.