Identification and In Vitro Expansion of Adult Hepatocyte Progenitors from Chronically Injured Livers

Methods in Molecular Biology
Naoki Tanimizu

Abstract

The liver performs a number of physiologically important functions. Hepatocytes are the liver parenchymal cells performing most of those functions. Therefore, it is important to recover functional hepatocytes after hepatic injury and prepare a mass of hepatocytes for regenerative medicine. We have found that mature hepatocytes dedifferentiate to hepatocyte progenitors in chronically injured mouse liver. Those hepatocyte progenitors can be isolated as CD24+EpCAM- cells from the CD31-CD45- fraction, which clonally proliferate and efficiently re-differentiate to functional hepatocytes both in vitro and in vivo. Here, I describe the methods to isolate hepatocyte progenitors from chronically injured liver, to expand them in vitro, and to induce differentiation into functional hepatocytes.

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