New Treatment Modalities by Disease-Specific and Patient-Specific Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Abstract

The broadly accepted and deeply rooted belief in developmental biology was that terminally differentiated cells had lost the potential to produce other cell types. In 2006, however, mouse somatic cells were reprogrammed as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that resembled embryonic stem cells. This therapeutic promise is being challenged by thousand of researchers worldwide to understand the ability of these cells to reverse biological clocks. Utilizing both "forward" and "reverse" genetic approaches with the aid of iPS cells offers exciting prospects for dissecting molecular mechanisms of commitment and differentiation in a cell lineage. This discovery will help clarify our understanding of the rewired regulatory networks active in somatic and pluripotent cells.