 Hi, I'm Kokkei Yen. I'm the research coordinator and clinical fellow at the Department of Vascular Surgery at the Fue medical center in Amsterdam. We recently published a research article in Human Mutation entitled The Transdifferentiation of Human Dermal Fibroblasts to Smooth Muscle-like Cells to Study the Effect of MYH-11 and Octa II Mutations in Aortic Aneurysms. The study has been performed in the Institute of Cardiovascular Research within a collaboration of the Departments of Surgery, Clinical Genetics and Physiology. In this study, we successfully transdifferentiated dermal fibroblasts into smooth muscle cells within two weeks. The transdifferentiated cells show the same characteristics as smooth muscle cells obtained from the order. In patients with a variant in MYH-11 or Octa II, the effects of intronic variants on splicing were shown on messenger RNA level. Using this method, we were able to classify variants into pathogenic or non-pathogenic. Direct conversion of human dermal fibroblasts into smooth muscle-like cells is a highly efficient method to study the pathogenicity of variants in proteins of smooth muscle cells. You can read our article online and we're open for discussion and collaboration.