US Patent 9334479 Liver progenitor cells

The invention relates to human liver pluripotent progenitor cell lines which express hepatic cell markers such as albumin and α-fetoprotein and do not express some of the markers which are typical of oval stem cells. Also disclosed is a method of isolating the cell lines of the invention, methods for differentiating said cells into a plurality of different cell lineages, methods for conditional immortalization and metabolic selection of said cells, as well as the use of the cell lines of the invention for preparing a medicament with osteogenic differentiation activity or liver injury regeneration activity.