Nature Medicine
6, 1229 - 1234 (2000)
doi:10.1038/81326
Purified hematopoietic stem cells can differentiate into hepatocytes
in vivoEric Lagasse1, Heather Connors1, Muhsen Al-Dhalimy2, Michael Reitsma1, Monika Dohse1, Linda Osborne1, Xin Wang2, Milton Finegold3, Irving L. Weissman4
& Markus Grompe21
StemCells, 525 Del Rey Avenue, Suite
C, Sunnyvale, California 94085,
USA
2
Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics, Oregon
Health Sciences University, 3181 S.W. Sam Jackson Park Road,
L103, Portland, Oregon 97201,
USA
3
Department of Pathology, Texas Children's Hospital,
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas
77030, USA
4
Department of Pathology and Developmental Biology,
Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford,
California 94305, USA
Correspondence should be addressed to Eric Lagasse elagasse@stemcell.netThe characterization of hepatic progenitor cells is of great scientific
and clinical interest. Here we report that intravenous injection of adult
bone marrow cells in the FAH-/- mouse, an animal
model of tyrosinemia type I, rescued the mouse and restored the biochemical
function of its liver. Moreover, within bone marrow, only rigorously purified
hematopoietic stem cells gave rise to donor-derived hematopoietic and hepatic
regeneration. This result seems to contradict the conventional assumptions
of the germ layer origins of tissues such as the liver, and raises the question
of whether the cells of the hematopoietic stem cell phenotype are pluripotent
hematopoietic cells that retain the ability to transdifferentiate, or whether
they are more primitive multipotent cells.
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