IPS Cells

Worldwide increases in life expectancy have been paralleled by a greater prevalence of chronic and age-associated disorders, particularly of the cardiovascular, neural and metabolic systems. This has not been met by commensurate development of new drugs and therapies, which is in part owing to the difficulty in modelling human diseases in laboratory assays or experimental animals. 

Commercially Confidential 4 The field of stem cell biology has been catapulted forward by the startling development of reprogramming technology. The ability to restore pluripotency to somatic cells through the ectopic co-expression of reprogramming factors has created powerful new opportunities for modelling human diseases and offers hope for personalized regenerative cellular therapies. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are an emerging paradigm that may address this. Reprogrammed somatic cells from patients are already applied in disease modelling, drug testing and drug discovery, thus enabling researchers to undertake studies for treating diseases ‘in a dish’, which was previously inconceivable. iPS cells are derived from skin or blood cells that have been reprogrammed back into an embryonic-like pluripotent state that enables the development of an unlimited source of any type of human cell needed for therapeutic purposes.

After a decade of constraints, pluripotent stemcell biology is now a flourishing research area, following the achievement of a long-standing ambition — the successful derivation of pluripotent stem cells from a patient’s cells. In 2006 Takahashi and Yamanaka illustrated how cell fates can be altered by the ectopic co-expression of certain transcription factors. The manipulation of cell fates through reprogramming has altered fundamental ideas about the stability of cellular identity, stimulating major new directions in research into human disease modelling, tissue differentiation in vitro and cellular transdifferentiation.