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Incidence and mortality of liver disease has increased globally in recent years. Orthotopic liver transplantation is a well-developed, effective therapy even for the end-stage liver diseases. However, the application of the technique is limited by the short supply of donors and the complexity of orthotopic liver transplantation. Therefore, hepatocyte transplantation as a new therapeutic option was developed. Unfortunately, the routine supply of high quality human hepatocytes was also restricted and the liver donor was lacking, too. Thus, exploration and study for available and renewable sources of nondonor hepatocytes are both necessary and important. Researches have proved that nondonor hepatocyte-like cells can be derived from various types of cells including embryonic stem cells (ESCs), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), liver stem cells (LSCs), fibroblasts by lineage reprogramming, hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). In this review, we describe recent advances in the field of the cell therapy in liver regeneration. In addition, we also discuss the existing restrictions in these types of therapies and ongoing developments.

Hepatocyte transplantation has been proved an effective method to help liver regeneration by replacing host deficient cells caused by various disorders or injuries. However, several problems existing in hepatocyte transplantation have limited the clinical application of the technology. These problems include limited survival time of transplanted cells, immune rejection in xenotransplantation and insufficient transplantation efficiency. The rapid development of nanotechnology provides an opportunity for solving these problems. Application of nanomaterials in liver regeneration has been frequently reported recently. According to these researches, nanomaterials have advantages on the aspects of helping cell adhesion and growth, maintaining cell function and inducing cell differentiation. What is more, nanomaterials also exhibited its advantage on cell migration tracking, thus could help to monitor the cells transplantation and noninvasive diagnosis. For the further application of nanomaterials in liver regeneration, a complete understanding of current progress will be necessary and helpful. Our goal in this review is to summarize the current status of the applications of nanomaterials in hepatocyte transplantation. We will focus on nanomaterials that acted as scaffolds for hepatocyte growth and function maintenance, delivery cargo for improving hepatocyte transplantation and trackers for in vivo monitoring.