Rapid establishment of the European Bank for induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (EBiSC) - the Hot Start experience

Abstract

A fast track "Hot Start" process was implemented to launch the European Bank for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (EBiSC) to provide early release of a range of established control and disease linked human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) lines. Established practice amongst consortium members was surveyed to arrive at harmonised and publically accessible Standard Operations Procedures (SOPs) for tissue procurement, bio-sample tracking, iPSC expansion, cryopreservation, qualification and distribution to the research community. These were implemented to create a quality managed foundational collection of lines and associated data made available for distribution. Here we report on the successful outcome of this experience and work flow for banking and facilitating access to an otherwise disparate European resource, with lessons to benefit the international research community. ETOC: The report focuses on the EBiSC experience of rapidly establishing an operational capacity to procure, bank and distribute a foundational collection of established hiPSC lines. It validates the feasibility and defines the challenges of harnessing and integrating the capability and productivity of centres across Europe using commonly available resources currently in the field.

Addressing variability in iPSC-derived models of human disease: guidelines to promote reproducibility

“…Moreover, these lines are often accompanied by wholeexome or genome sequencing data and are subject to extensive transcriptomic and proteomic analyses. The lines available already cover a multitude of disorders, with a particular focus on lines from individuals carrying rare genetic variants (Cader et al, 2019;De Sousa et al, 2017). Despite these QC advantages, we argue that it is the re-use of lines between studies that will prove key to accounting for variation within these models (Volpato et al, 2018).…”

Human in vitro models for understanding mechanisms of autism spectrum disorder

“…This limitation makes it difficult to study the effects of common variation in ASD and limits the utility of these models for non-personalized drug and genetic screening. There are many efforts in the field to overcome this limitation by generating repositories of iPSC lines that will be available to researchers [145,[181][182][183]. These large repositories will allow researchers to use larger sample sizes to study the effects of genetic background on ASD and will allow them to stratify their studies based on both symptoms and genetic background.…”

Human Cardiac Organoids for Disease Modeling

“…The use of hiPSCs reduces ethical concerns significantly as blastocyst destruction, which occurs during embryonic stem cell harvesting, can be avoided. The two main pluripotent stem cell banks in the world—WiCell (Madison, WI) and European Bank for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell—have vast hiPSC collections from healthy patients for distinct age ranges, racial backgrounds, and gender, as well as specific disease phenotypes and known genetic mutations. Heart disease–associated hiPSCs have been derived from patients with cardiomyopathy, cardiomyopathy‐associated Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), familial long QT syndrome, prolonged QT interval, arrhythmia, hypertrophy, and myocardial infarction.…”