Efficient hepatic differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells in a three-dimensional microscale culture

Methods Mol Biol. 2014:1210:131-41. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-1435-7_10.

Abstract

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) represent a novel source of hepatocytes for drug development, disease modeling studies, and regenerative therapy for the treatment of liver diseases. A number of protocols for generating functional hepatocytes have been reported worldwide; however, reproducible and efficient differentiation remained challenging under conventional two-dimensional (2D) culture. In this study, we describe an efficient differentiation protocol for generating functional hepatocyte-like cells from human iPSC-derived homogenous hepatic endoderm cells combined with three-dimensional (3D) microscale culture system. First, hepatic endoderm cells (iPSC-HEs) were directly differentiated using two-step approaches, and then cultured in the 3D micropattern plate. Human iPSC-HEs quickly reaggregated and formed hundreds of round-shaped spheroids at day 4 of cell plating. The size distribution of iPSC-HEs derived spheroids was relatively uniform around 100-200 μm in diameter. After 14 days, iPSC-HEs efficiently differentiated into hepatocyte-like cells in terms of hepatic maker gene expression compared with conventional 2D approach. We conclude that our scalable and three-dimensional culture system would be one promising approach to generate a huge number of hepatocyte-like cells from human iPSCs aiming at future industrial and clinical applications.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Cell Culture Techniques*
  • Cell Differentiation*
  • Fibroblasts / cytology
  • Fibroblasts / metabolism
  • Hepatocytes / cytology*
  • Hepatocytes / metabolism
  • Humans
  • Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells / cytology*
  • Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells / metabolism
  • Mice