The capacity of embryonic stem (ES) cells to differentiate to hepatocytes in culture provides a unique modelsystem to study alcohol-induced liver injury in vitro, and ultimately to provide large amount of maturehepatocytes for transplantation in liver failure due to chronic alcoholic liver disease. Liver develops from thegut endoderm along with other major organs including the pancreas, lungs, thyroid and intestines. Theexperiments outlined in the proposal build on previous observations that endoderm-derived hepatoblast-likecells can be efficiently and reproducibly induced in the mouse ES cell system and seek to translate themurine ES cell differentiation program to the human ES cell program'!. This application addresses questionsrelating to maturation of mouse ES-derived hepatoblast-like cells, to the endoderm induction in the humanES cell system and its specification to a hepatic fate and finally to mature human hepatocytes. Therefore, theultimate goal of these studies is to develop a feasible approach to generate functional hepatocytes frommouse and human ES cells as an in vitro model to study alcohol-induced liver injury.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 90 publications