ABSTRACT
Chemical biology focuses on the discovery and use of chemical compounds to understand and manipulate biological systems. It has been applied in many fields, including stem cell research. Recently, stem cell research has made significant progresses. A better understanding of stem cell biology will also promote the translation of stem cell technology in regenerative medicine. Elucidating the mechanisms governing cell fate determination and developing strategies to precisely manipulate cell fates are the fundamental issues in stem cell research. The use of small molecules to manipulate stem cell behaviors, including self-renewal, differentiation and reprogramming, has become more and more popular and offered significant advantages over conventional genetic approaches for their convenience in use, high degree of temporal control and functional diversity. In addition, based on our long-term experience in small molecular drug development, the application of chemical compounds to modulate stem cell functions in vivo for regeneration and repair could be the future direction of regenerative medicine.
ABSTRACT
Reprogramming cell fates towards pluripotent stem cells and other cell types has revolutionized our understanding of cellular plasticity. During the last decade, transcription factors and microRNAs have become powerful reprogramming factors for modulating cell fates. Recently, many efforts are focused on reprogramming cell fates by non-viral and non-integrating chemical approaches. Small molecules not only are useful in generating desired cell types in vitro for various applications, such as disease modeling and cell-based transplantation, but also hold great promise to be further developed as drugs to stimulate patients' endogenous cells to repair and regenerate in vivo. Here we will focus on chemical approaches for generating induced pluripotent stem cells, neurons, cardiomyocytes, hepatocytes and pancreatic β cells. Significantly, the rapid and exciting advances in cellular reprogramming by small molecules will help us to achieve the long-term goal of curing devastating diseases, injuries, cancers and aging.