Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that afflicts around 1% of the population over age 65 1. One of the pathological hallmarks of PD is the degeneration of dopaminergic (DA) neurons at midbrain and the relatively focal lesion feature of PD makes cell replacement a promising approach for treating the disease 2.

We have previously shown that a sertoli cell, a mesoderm-derived terminally differentiated cell, can be reprogrammed directly to a neural stem cell-like cell by defined factors 3. From the perspective of clinical applications, sertoli cells may not be an ideal cell source. Therefore, in the current study, we continued to examine whether fibroblasts can be converted to DA neurons through two separate routes. One is to directly convert fibroblasts to mature DA neurons (induced DA neurons) and the other is to induce fibroblasts first into neural progenitors (induced neural progenitor cells (iNPCs)) that possess the potential of DA neuron specification.

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