Induced Pleuripotent Stem Cells: A Pioneer in Therapy

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The pluripotent stem cells can potentially be used to counter a wide range of diseases, from diabetes to spinal cord injury, to childhood leukemia, to heart disease. Human iPS cells are similar to human embryonic stem (ES) cells in terms of proliferation and differentiation ability, and can be generated from adult somatic cells. Now we can easily generate iPS cells from patient's somatic cells and those iPS cells have all genomic information of the patient genome. Many human diseases are caused by genomic mutation. Disease modeling using human iPS cells is newly emerged research field to analyze genetic human diseases. Actually, there are many fatal genetic diseases without effective therapy. To develop newly effective therapies for those diseases, first of all we have to generate disease models. In the past, there had been solely animal models of human genetic disease, such as specific gene knockout mice, transgenic mice and autochthonous diseased animals. Although those models gave us many valuable information regarding the mechanisms of human genetic diseases, most crucial problem is that those models are not human. So it is often difficult to model human diseases using experimental animals. One of the important points is, among humans, each individual shows highly rich in genomic diversity in terms of racial differences and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). So it has been highly expected to generate not only diseasespecific models, but also disease-specific and patient-specific disease models. To generate patientspecific disease models, now we can use iPS cells. 1