AUTHOR=Miura Shizuka , Suzuki Atsushi TITLE=Acquisition of lipid metabolic capability in hepatocyte-like cells directly induced from mouse fibroblasts JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology VOLUME=2 YEAR=2014 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cell-and-developmental-biology/articles/10.3389/fcell.2014.00043 DOI=10.3389/fcell.2014.00043 ISSN=2296-634X ABSTRACT=
Recently, the numbers of patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) have increased worldwide. NAFLD and NASH are known as risk factors for liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Because many factors can promote the progression of NAFLD and NASH, the treatment of these patients involves various strategies. Thus, it is desired that drugs for patients with NAFLD and NASH should be developed more easily and rapidly using cultures of primary hepatocytes. However, it is difficult to use hepatocytes as a tool for drug screening, because these cells cannot be functionally maintained in culture. Thus, in this study, we sought to examine whether induced hepatocyte-like (iHep) cells, which were directly induced from mouse dermal fibroblasts by infection with a retrovirus expressing