Gene therapy by using stem cells in the treatment of hepatitis

Chronic hepatitis can resolve spontaneously or progress to more advanced stages, i.e. fibrosis, cirrhosis, and liver cancer, respectively. Two million deaths each year are attributed to liver diseases globally. Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis comprise 11th position in leading causes of death worldwide. Viral infections account for the etiologic factor of most cases of hepatitis. Almost the only available way for the treatment of end stages of hepatitis is liver transplantation. The biggest problem with this therapeutic approach is the number of liver transplant donors is less than the number of recipients. Therefore, more advanced methods must investigate. Recently, gene therapy by the utilization of stem cells yielded promising results in clinical and preclinical investigations to the treatment of liver diseases. Novel genome editing tools such as TALENs and CRISPR/Cas9 consider as powerful genome correction approaches and can employe for iPSCs gene editing. This paper highlights the various aspects of gene therapy through stem cells for liver diseases