Since the groundbreaking discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) by Shinya Yamanaka team in 2006, there has been an explosion of knowledge and enormous progress in regenerative medicine and stem cell therapy. iPSCs can self-renew and differentiate into any cell type from all three germ layers (ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm). Furthermore, disease-specific human iPSCs represent the 'gold standard' for disease modeling and autologous stem cell therapy.
iPSCs are advantageous in studying the molecular mechanism of many degenerative diseases, such as ischemic heart failure, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, spinal cord injuries and age-related macular degeneration. They have shown many significant advantages, including but not limited to:
1. Pluripotency, they can differentiate into any cell types;
2. Autologous source, they can be generated from terminally differentiated cells taken from patients to circumvent all the issues related to the immunological compatibility between the donor and receiver;
3. Self-renewal at a large scale to maintain a high therapeutic efficiency;
4. Eliminating ethical considerations associated with scientific work based on embryonic stem cells (ES);
5. Having a comparable differentiation ability to ES and the transcriptional profiles of iPSC and ES are nearly identical.
Due to these advantages, iPSCs hold great promise for use in disease modeling and personalized regenerative medicine.
Human iPSC can differentiate in vitro into diverse lineages, including cardiomyocytes, neurons, hematopoietic progenitors, endothelial cells, chondrocytes, osteoblasts, hepatocytes, islet-like cells, and retina. iPSC-based in vitro models have presented an unprecedented opportunity in disease modeling, high-throughput drug discovery, toxicity screening and safety pharmacology.
iPSC-based disease modeling has proven to be very powerful and instrumental in the investigation of disease pathology and the development of personalized medicine. Up to now, multiple diseased iPSC models have been generated allowing the study of human disease phenotypes which are currently difficult to obtain in animal models. It has been an alternative modeling method to fully mimic the human cell microenvironment and overcoming the challenge in genetic differences between different species.
Because of their unlimited quantities and theoretical pluripotency to differentiate into any cell types, iPSCs have gained a lot of popularity as more reliable in vitro human models of diseases for accelerated drug discovery and personalized precision medicines. Through omics analysis of diseased vs normal iPSCs (derived from individual patients and healthy subjects), scientists can reveal the disease-perturbed and drug-affected regulatory networks in comparison to normal ones, thereby serving as a powerful tool for drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry.
Because of the species differences in drug penetration of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), drug metabolism, and related toxicity, many drug trials from animal models to humans are failed. iPSCs provide simple, reproducible, and economically effective tools for drug toxicity screening. Knowledge of drug toxicity and efficacy obtained using iPSCs is more accurate than immortalized cells or small animal-based screening data, since it provides patient-specific efficacy. Human-derived iPSCs have been widely used in drug efficacy and toxicity assessment to minimize unwanted side effects.
iPSCs have been widely employed in various diseases for disease modeling and gene therapy. But there are still a number of challenges that must be overcome for iPSCs to reach their full potential. With years of exploration in iPSC development, Creative Biolabs provides the most flexible, adaptable, and customizable solutions for iPSCs development, including iPSCs culture, iPSCs genome editing, iPSC differentiation, iPSC characterization, etc.
If you are interested in our iPSCs services, please contact us for more information.
For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.
