Direct conversion of somatic cells to neuronal precursors: Problems and outlooks

The generation of multipotent patient-specific neural precursors from human fibroblasts is one of the challenges to regenerative medicine. A recently proposed novel approach allows direct conversion of human and mouse fibroblasts into induced neuronal precursor (iNP) cells by overexpression of a single transcription factor, Sox2. In this work, we have analyzed the Sox2-induced iNP cells and evaluated the possibility of its medical application....