1. Academic Validation
  2. Conversion of human fibroblasts into functional cardiomyocytes by small molecules

Conversion of human fibroblasts into functional cardiomyocytes by small molecules

  • Science. 2016 Jun 3;352(6290):1216-20. doi: 10.1126/science.aaf1502.
Nan Cao 1 Yu Huang 2 Jiashun Zheng 3 C Ian Spencer 2 Yu Zhang 1 Ji-Dong Fu 4 Baoming Nie 1 Min Xie 1 Mingliang Zhang 1 Haixia Wang 1 Tianhua Ma 1 Tao Xu 1 Guilai Shi 1 Deepak Srivastava 5 Sheng Ding 1
Affiliations

Affiliations

  • 1 Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA. Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA.
  • 2 Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA.
  • 3 Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA. California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA.
  • 4 Department of Medicine, Heart and Vascular Research Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA.
  • 5 Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA. Department of Pediatrics, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA. Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA.
Abstract

Reprogramming somatic fibroblasts into alternative lineages would provide a promising source of cells for regenerative therapy. However, transdifferentiating human cells into specific homogeneous, functional cell types is challenging. Here we show that cardiomyocyte-like cells can be generated by treating human fibroblasts with a combination of nine compounds that we term 9C. The chemically induced cardiomyocyte-like cells uniformly contracted and resembled human cardiomyocytes in their transcriptome, epigenetic, and electrophysiological properties. 9C treatment of human fibroblasts resulted in a more open-chromatin conformation at key heart developmental genes, enabling their promoters and enhancers to bind effectors of major cardiogenic signals. When transplanted into infarcted mouse hearts, 9C-treated fibroblasts were efficiently converted to chemically induced cardiomyocyte-like cells. This pharmacological approach to lineage-specific reprogramming may have many important therapeutic implications after further optimization to generate mature cardiac cells.

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