| BackgroundIt is always a focus in research as well as a difficulty in clinical practice to regenerate hepatocyte and repair liver function after hepatic injury due to various causes including chemical injury. Shortage of liver donators, difficulty to survive after implantation and high cost limited undesirably the therapies of liver graft and hepatic stem cell transplantatoin. Recently, however, embryonic stem cells (ESC) and bone marrow stem cells (BMSCs) have been highly thought of for their easy acquisition and convenient amplification in vitro, let alone their ability to differentiate to hepatocyte under some circumstances and involve in the regeneration of hepatocyte and the recovery of liver function. Currently, the acquisition of ESC has encountered some obstacles in ethics and law on one hand, and it arouses controversy over its safety in clinical use in the academic field on the other hand. Therefore, BMSCs have become a desirable favor, which casts a light on the research on regeneration and repair of injured liver, not only for their superiority in differentiation in vitro, their easy acquisition from bone marrow and amplification ex vivo, but for less controversy over its safety as well, especially for the freedom from censures in... |