Copyright
©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Cardiol. Mar 26, 2015; 7(3): 125-133
Published online Mar 26, 2015. doi: 10.4330/wjc.v7.i3.125
Published online Mar 26, 2015. doi: 10.4330/wjc.v7.i3.125
Making cardiomyocytes with your chemistry set: Small molecule-induced cardiogenesis in somatic cells
Woong-Hee Kim, Da-Woon Jung, Darren Reece Williams, New Drug Targets Laboratory, School of Life Sciences, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju 500-712, South Korea
Author contributions: All authors contributed equally to this editorial.
Supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and funded by the Korean Government, (MEST Basic Science Research Program grant, No. NRF-2012R1A1B5000462 to D.-W.J; the Korean Health Technology R&D Project, Ministry of Health and Welfare, South Korea, No. HI12C0275; and the Bioimaging Center, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology.
Conflict-of-interest: The authors declare no conflict-of-interest in relation to this editorial.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Darren Reece Williams, PhD, New Drug Targets Laboratory, School of Life Sciences, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju 500-712, South Korea. darren@gist.ac.kr
Telephone: +82-62-7152509 Fax: +82-62-7152484
Received: October 27, 2014
Peer-review started: October 28, 2014
First decision: December 17, 2014
Revised: January 5, 2015
Accepted: January 18, 2015
Article in press: January 19, 2015
Published online: March 26, 2015
Processing time: 137 Days and 15.5 Hours
Peer-review started: October 28, 2014
First decision: December 17, 2014
Revised: January 5, 2015
Accepted: January 18, 2015
Article in press: January 19, 2015
Published online: March 26, 2015
Processing time: 137 Days and 15.5 Hours
Core Tip
Core tip: There are a plethora of methods to manipulate the phenotype of somatic cells and convert them into different cell types, such as cardiac cells. The use of small molecules provides numerous advantages, such as ease of use, tight temporal control and reversible effects on target proteins. Significantly, the production of small molecules is cheap and synthesis can be readily standardized. This would allow non-specialist stem cell laboratories to readily adopt small molecule-based methods to produce functional cardiac cells from multiple cell sources, including therapeutic applications requiring the somatic cells of patients with cardiovascular disease.