“Reprogramming in vivo and its impact on tissue homeostasis and regeneration”. Manuel Serrano

Despite the high interest in the reprogramming field due to the potential therapeutical applications, the possibility to change the cellular identity in vivo within the tissues will represent a potent tool to understand the mechanisms that control cell fate in a physiological context. Manuel Serrano’s group developed a transgenic mouse with inducible expression of the Yamanaka factors to dedifferentiate multiple tissues. Apart from the groundbreaking evidence that cells could be reprogrammed back to pluripotency in living mammals, thus definitively confirming that the differentiated state of a cell is not permanently locked within the body, his results suggest that the in vivo-generated iPSCs circulating in the blood of these mice represent a more primitive or plastic state than ESCs or in vitro-iPSCs.