Proteins Reprogramming: Present and Future

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are of great clinical interest for they are derived from one's own somatic cells and have the potential of committed differentiation without immunological rejection after autografting. However, the use of viral and other modified vectors may still cause tumorigenesis due to chromosome insertion mutation, leading to limited practical use. iPSCs generated by reprogramming proteins overcome the potential safety risk and complicated manipulation procedures, thus they own better application prospective, yet some technical difficulties need to be studied and resolved, for instance, low reprogramming efficiency, unclear transduction, and reprogramming mechanism. In this paper, we summarize the current progress of proteins reprogramming technology for generation of iPSCs and discuss the promising efficiency-improved reprogramming methods by proteins plus other kinds of chemical compounds.