Adult intrahepatic progenitor/stem cells capable of producing both bile ducts and hepatocytes during injury responses are of great importance in liver biology, both in health and disease. During the past funding period we have finally been able to home in on this long elusive cell population. It is now possible to prospectively isolate te intrahepatic stem cell of mice by FACS, to culture it in vitro and to perform lineage tracing in vivo. We have performed gene expression profiling on LPCs both in the resting state and after activation of the oval cell response. This analysis has revealed several novel genes unique to this population, suggesting that they play important roles in their maintenance and/or function. Using genetic tools it is therefore now possible to explore the function of these factors in liver progenitors. This information will be useful to control and manipulate the behavior of LPC both in vivo and in vitro for the purposes of regenerative medicine. We also have been able to establish expandable cultures of human LPC and thus will be able to translate lessons from the murine system to human biology. In this application, we propose to systematically explore the function of key genes unique to adult LPC (Aim1), to use genomic approaches to understand the oval cell activation process in greater depth (Aim2) and to test the utility of human LPC as an expandable source of hepatocytes (Aim3) . Successful completion of this research will result deepen our understanding of the molecular controls governing adult liver progenitors and make them amenable to therapeutic manipulations.
Intrahepatic stem cells play an important role in the ability of the liver to regenerate during disease and damage, especially chronic injury. Until recently, the precise identity and location of this cell remained unknown, but now we and others have found methods to isolate these cells from both mice and humans. The relevance of the proposed studies is that they will lead to a detailed molecular understanding of how adult liver progenitors are regulated and will open up the possibility of manipulating their behavior in chronic liver disease and using them for transplantation.
| Li, Bin; Dorrell, Craig; Canaday, Pamela S et al. (2017) Adult Mouse Liver Contains Two Distinct Populations of Cholangiocytes. Stem Cell Reports 9:478-489 |
| Kopp, Janel L; Grompe, Markus; Sander, Maike (2016) Stem cells versus plasticity in liver and pancreas regeneration. Nat Cell Biol 18:238-45 |
| Naugler, Willscott E; Tarlow, Branden D; Fedorov, Lev M et al. (2015) Fibroblast Growth Factor Signaling Controls Liver Size in Mice With Humanized Livers. Gastroenterology 149:728-40.e15 |
| Tarlow, Branden D; Finegold, Milton J; Grompe, Markus (2014) Clonal tracing of Sox9+ liver progenitors in mouse oval cell injury. Hepatology 60:278-89 |
| Tarlow, Branden D; Pelz, Carl; Naugler, Willscott E et al. (2014) Bipotential adult liver progenitors are derived from chronically injured mature hepatocytes. Cell Stem Cell 15:605-18 |
| Dorrell, Craig; Tarlow, Branden; Wang, Yuhan et al. (2014) The organoid-initiating cells in mouse pancreas and liver are phenotypically and functionally similar. Stem Cell Res 13:275-83 |
| Huch, Meritxell; Dorrell, Craig; Boj, Sylvia F et al. (2013) In vitro expansion of single Lgr5+ liver stem cells induced by Wnt-driven regeneration. Nature 494:247-50 |
| Gramignoli, Roberto; Tahan, Veysel; Dorko, Kenneth et al. (2013) New potential cell source for hepatocyte transplantation: discarded livers from metabolic disease liver transplants. Stem Cell Res 11:563-73 |
| Grompe, Markus; Strom, Stephen (2013) Mice with human livers. Gastroenterology 145:1209-14 |
| Vaughan, Ashley M; Mikolajczak, Sebastian A; Wilson, Elizabeth M et al. (2012) Complete Plasmodium falciparum liver-stage development in liver-chimeric mice. J Clin Invest 122:3618-28 |
Showing the most recent 10 out of 18 publications
