Protein Transduction: A Novel Tool for Tissue Regeneration

Abstract

Abstract Tissue regeneration in humans is limited and excludes vitals organs like heart and brain. Transformation experiments with oncogenes like T antigen have shown that retrodifferentiation of the respective cells is possible but hard to control. To bypass the risk of cancer formation a protein therapy approach has been developed. The transient delivery of proteins rather than genes could still induce terminallydifferentiated cells to reenter the cell cycle. This approach takes advantage of proteintransducing domains that mediate the transfer of cargo proteins into cells. The goal of this brief review is to outline the basics of protein transduction and to discuss potential applications for tissue regeneration.