Turning off p53 enables human skin cells to reprogram into nerve cells

摘要

Fraught with ethical concerns, the quest for human embryonic stem cells has spawned a race to generate personalized patient-specific pluri-potent cells to treat neurodegenera-tive diseases. Human-induced pluri-potent stem cells (iPSC) have been created by expressing four transcription factors in fibroblast cells, but this form of reprogramming has raised concerns that overexpression of these factors could trigger tumor-igenesis. Shengwen Calvin Li et al.