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Abstract
Liver fibrosis is the wound-healing response of the liver to chronic injury (Friedman, 2003). Following repeated injury, the liver undergoes tissue remodeling and forms fibrosis. It is characterized by excessive accumulation of extracellular matrix, with the formation of scar tissue encapsulating the area of injury. The prognosis of patients with the disease is poor, although liver transplantation is a good alternative treatment. Moreover, there are limited available donor livers for hundreds of millions of patients worldwide (Iredale, 2003 and Lee et al., 2004). So, it is very important to investigate appropriate therapies for the disease by different treatments.
Bone marrow contains at least two kinds of stem cells, hematopoietic stem cells and stem cells for nonhematopoietic tissues (Piersma et al., 1985 and Owen and Friedenstein, 1988 ), variously referred to as mesenchymal stem cells or marrow stromal cells (MSCs). MSCs are of interest because they are easily isolated from a small aspirate of bone marrow and readily generate single-cell-derived colonies (Woodbury et al., 2000) They can differentiate into osteoblasts, adipocytes, chondrocytes (Bruder et al., 1997), myocytes (Wakitani et al., 1995), astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, neurons (Kopen et al., 1999) and hepatocytes. (Lee et al., 2004). For these reasons, the cells are currently being tested for their potential use in cell and gene therapy for a number of diseases (Horwitz et al. 1999).