Nature Deng Hongkui's team published major research results - chemical small molecules induce human adult...

Pluripotent stem cells have the characteristics of infinite proliferation and the ability to differentiate into all functional cell types of the organism.

In the 1960s, British scientist John Gurdon developed cell nuclear transfer technology in Xenopus.

For a long time, Deng Hongkui's team has been working on developing new methods for regulating cell fate and establishing the underlying technology for making stem cells

In this study, Deng Hongkui's team reported for the first time the method of chemical reprogramming, and successfully achieved the use of chemical small molecules to induce human adult cells into pluripotent stem cells (human CiPS cells)

Figure 1: Next-generation induced pluripotent stem cell technology

As a higher animal, the complexity of human adult cell characteristics and homeostasis regulation is far from that of mouse adult cells, and there are many obstacles at the epigenetic level, which severely limit the possibility of stimulating cellular plasticity in human adult cells

Figure 2 Human cytochemical reprogramming induces human CiPS cells

Compared with the traditional technical system, the CiPS cell induction technology has irreplaceable advantages such as being safer and simpler, easy to standardize, and easy to regulate.

On this basis, the research team also delineated the molecular pathway of chemical reprogramming to induce human CiPS cells, revealing the different molecular mechanisms and unique regulatory mechanisms of chemical reprogramming and traditional transcription factor reprogramming

In recent years, Deng Hongkui's team has extended the strategy of chemical reprogramming to different aspects of regulating cell fate

In summary, the establishment of the chemical reprogramming technology system not only has great significance and value in the field of clinical application of pluripotent stem cells, but also provides a new perspective and platform for the theoretical study of cell fate regulation and regenerative biology

Professor Deng Hongkui from the School of Life Sciences of Peking University and the Joint Center for Life Sciences led the research