Direct conversion of skin cells into blood: alchemy or science?

摘要

Our neighborhood blood bank just announced an emergency Thanksgiving-season blood drive. For years, the field of stem cell biology has described an elusive but commonly understood goal: the elimination of a need for blood drives. Many years of work have led to methods for generation of bona fide hematopoietic cells from human and mouse embryonic stem cells, but problems with efficiency as well as maturation of the blood cells persist, impeding the utility of these methods in manufacturing blood. Now, in the era of "direct reprogramming," we can imagine a goal of converting an adult cell, such as a skin cell, into a hematopoietic stem cell that can be used for autologous blood replacement (Figure 1). In an article recently published in Nature, Szabo et al. report a huge step toward that goal. The authors describe the generation of differentiated hematopoietic cells following the enforced expression of the POU-domain transcription factor OCT4 in adult or neonatal human skin fibroblasts.