Harnessing the Potential of Stem Cells for Disease Modeling: Progress and Promises

Abstract

Ex vivo cell/tissue-based models are an essential step in the workflow of pathophysiology studies, assay development, disease modeling, drug discovery, and development of personalized therapeutic strategies. For these purposes, both scientific and pharmaceutical research have adopted ex vivo stem cell models because of their better predictive power. As matter of a fact, the advancing in isolation and in vitro expansion protocols for culturing autologous human stem cells, and the standardization of methods for generating patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells has made feasible to generate and investigate human cellular disease models with even greater speed and efficiency. Furthermore, the potential of stem cells on generating more complex systems, such as scaffold-cell models, organoids, or organ-on-a-chip, allowed to overcome the limitations of the two-dimensional culture systems as well as to better mimic tissues structures and functions. Finally, the advent of genome-editing/gene therapy technologies had a great impact on the generation of more proficient stem cell-disease models and on establishing an effective therapeutic treatment. In this review, we discuss important breakthroughs of stem cell-based models highlighting current directions, advantages, and limitations and point out the need to combine experimental biology with computational tools able to describe complex biological systems and deliver results or predictions in the context of personalized medicine.Since their establishment, cell cultures have been proven to be the first and most powerful tool for the in vitro investigation of cell biology, from basic research to more complex translational approaches [6]. Classical two-dimensional (2D)-cultures usually consist of a unique type of cells (primary or continuous cultures) that grow in tissue culture polystyrene as adherent monolayers or in floating suspension, both in culture media that provide essential nutrients and growth factors. 2D-strategies are widely used to obtain a large number of cells, thus allowing the in vitro study of molecular mechanisms and development of metabolic assays [7-9]. However, due to their inability to recreate the in vivo complexity of the biological environment, they are not suitable for accurate disease modeling. These limitations have been overcome by the development of three-dimensional (3D)-cell cultures systems [10]. The rationale design of 3D-cell cultures is to harvest cells in microstructures that resemble tissues or organs shape and organization, thus allowing better cell-to-cell/cell-environment contacts and signaling crosstalk [11][12][13][14][15], essential events for tissues correct development and functioning [14,15]. The 3D-cell culture strategy is articulated in many different methods and techniques that can be grouped in scaffold-based or non-scaffold based platforms, each with particular advantages and disadvantages that make them useful for different applications [10,[16][17][18][19]. 3D-cell culture strategies are supported by the in silico...

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The role of physical cues in the development of stem cell-derived organoids

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