Direct conversion of astrocytes into neuronal cells by drug cocktail

摘要

Dear Editor, Neurological disorder is one of the greatest threats to public health according to the World Health Organization.Because neurons have little or no regenerative capacity, conventional therapies for neurological disorders yielded poor outcomes.While the introduction of exogenous neural stem cells or neurons holds promise, many challenges still need to be tackled, including cell resource, delivery strategy, cell integration and cell maturation.Reprogramming of fibroblasts into induced pluripotent stem cells or directly into desirable neuronal cells by transcription factors (TFs) or small molecules can solve some problems, but other issues remain to be addressed, including safety, conversion efficiency and epigenetic memory [1, 2].