Generating Functional Cells Through Enhanced Interspecies Chimerism with Human Pluripotent Stem Cells

Abstract

Obtaining functional human cells through interspecies chimerism with human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) remains unsuccessful due to its extreamly low efficiency. Here, we show that hPSCs failed to differentiate and contribute teratoma in presence of mouse PSCs (mPSCs). While, MYCN, a pro-growth factor dramatically promotes hPSC contribution in teratoma co-formation by hPSCs/mPSCs. MYCN combined with BCL2 (M/B) greatly enhanced conventional hPSCs to integrate into preimplantation embryos of different species, such as mice, rabbits and pigs and substrantially contributed to mouse post-implantation chimera in embryonic and extra-embyonic tissues. Strikingly, M/B-hPSCs injected into preimplantation Flk-1+/- mouse embryos show further enhanced chimerism that allows obtaining live human CD34+ blood progenitor cells from chimeras through cell sorting. The chimera derived human CD34+ cells further gave rise to various subtype blood cells in typical colony forming unit(CFU) assay. Thus, we proof the concept to obtain functional human cells through enchanced interspecies chimerism with hPSCs.