Brief Azacytidine Step Allows the Conversion of Suspension Human Fibroblasts Into Neural Progenitor-Like Cells

In recent years transdifferentiation technology has enabled direct conversion of humanfibroblasts to become a valuable, abundant and accessible cell source for patient-specificinduced cell generation in biomedical research. the majority of transdifferentiation approachesrely upon viral gene delivery which due to random integration with the hostgenome can cause genome instability and tumorigenesis upon transplantation. here, weprovide a simple way to induce neural progenitor-like cells from human fibroblasts withoutgenetic manipulation by changing physicochemical culture properties from monolayerculture into a suspension in the presence of a chemical dna methyltransferase inhibitoragent, azacytidine. we have demonstrated the expression of neural progenitor-like markers,morphology and the ability to spontaneously differentiate into neural-like cells. thisapproach is simple, inexpensive, lacks genetic manipulation and could be a foundation forfuture chemical neural transdifferentiation and a safe induction of neural progenitor cellsfrom human fibroblasts for clinical applications.