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Blood research and therapeutics for blood disorders would greatly benefit from a ready source of stem and progenitor cells. Although hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) have been produced by many routes and from many sources, they generally fail to exhibit long-term engraftment in stem-cell-depleted bone marrow or to generate functional immune cells. Sugimura et al. screened transcription factors in human pluripotent-stem-cell-derived hemogenic endothelium (a blood-producing fetal tissue) and identified a set of seven that confer HSC-like long-term engraftment in a mouse host. Lis et al. started with endothelial cells from adult mice and used a combination of four transcription factors and coculture with an inductive vascular niche to generate HSCs that exhibit long-term engraftment, as well as antigen-dependent adaptive immune function. The two studies bring the greatly anticipated prospect of cultured blood much closer to reality.
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Functional blood progenitors for mouse and man. Nat Methods 14, 654 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4353
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4353