Introduction: Liver is the biggest gland in the body and hepatocytes are the most common cell type in the liver mass, responsible for its key biological functions. Under physiological conditions, hepatocytes can easily contribute to liver regeneration, however, they fail to repopulate the liver following chronic damages. Orthotopic liver transplantation is the main standard therapeutic approach for patients with end stage liver diseases. Despite the remarkable advancements in liver transplantation, unfortunately, some patients die in the first 6 months post operation. Thus, finding other therapeutic strategies other than liver transplantation is one of the challenging issues in this field. Cell therapy, especially, stem cell based therapy is one of the main and safe replacements for complete organ transplantation. Human embryonic stem cells are a good source for liver regeneration. These cells can be differentiated to various cell types and used in artificial or bioartificial livers. Human liver cell lines can be also established from other cell sources including induced pluripotent stem cells and induced hepatocyte-like cells, which nowadays are in especial interest considering the ethical problems of using embryonic stem cells and are the best promising candidates for liver disease modeling and drug screening. Literature Review: Here, after a brief introduction to hepatocyte markers from embryonic to adult status, we review the methods applied for hepatocyte induction in different mouse and human stem cells both in vitro and in vivo. Finally, unique advantages and disadvantages of each kind of stem cells applied for hepatocyte differentiation are compared. Conclusions: Despite the remarkable results achieved in the engineering of thin tissues such as skin, in vitro construction of more complicated thick tissues including heart, liver and kidney remains in primary stages and needs to be further explored. In this regard, stem cell based therapy can be used as a promising method to render the suffering of patients and increase the scientific knowledge in the field of liver regenerative medicine.

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