Strategies for in vivo reprogramming

Reprogramming has the potential to provide specific cell types for regenerative medicine applications aiming at replacing tissues that have been lost or damaged due to degenerative diseases and injury. In this review we discuss the latest strategies and advances of in vivo reprogramming to convert cell identities in living organisms, including reprogramming induced by transcription factors (TFs) and CRISPR/dCas9 synthetic TFs, as well as by cell fusion and small molecules. We also provide a brief recap of reprogramming barriers, the effect of senescence on reprogramming efficiency, and strategies to deliver reprogramming factors in vivo. Because of the limited space, we omit dwelling on naturally occurring reprogramming phenomena such as developmentally programmed transdifferentiation found in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.