Volume 25, No 11, Nov 2015

ISSN: 1001-0602 
EISSN: 1748-7838 2018 
impact factor 17.848* 
(Clarivate Analytics, 2019)

Volume 25 Issue 11, November 2015: 1269-1272   |  Open Access

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Direct conversion of astrocytes into neuronal cells by drug cocktail

Lin Cheng^1,4,*, Longfei Gao^1,*, Wuqiang Guan², Jianxin Mao¹, Wenxiang Hu¹, Binlong Qiu¹, Jian Zhao¹, Yongchun Yu² and Gang Pei^1,3

¹State Key Laboratory of Cell Biology, Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
²State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology, Shanghai Medical College and Institutes of Brain Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200032, China
³Collaborative Innovation Center for Brain Science, School of Life Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
⁴State Key Laboratory of Medical Genomics, Shanghai Institute of Hematology, Rui Jin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai 200025, China Correspondence: Gang Pei,(gpei@sibs.ac.cn)

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 memory1,2.

10.1038/cr.2015.120

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