Figure 4.

Tumour stem cell reprogramming versus reprogramming to pluripotency. (A) Recent in vivo genetic evidences have shown that human oncogenes are capable of reprogramming early stem/precursor cells towards specific differentiated tumour cell fates, but they are not required afterwards, within the malignant cells. (B) ‘Hit-and-run’ reprogramming has grounding in other contexts outside of cancer, such as during induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell formation in vitro. However, unlike the tumour stem cell reprogramming, the iPS process initiates in a differentiated cell (see text for details).