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TITLE
Development of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for Modeling Human Disease
ABSTRACT
Human embryonic stem cells (hESC) hold great promise in regenerative medicine and cell replacement therapies because of their unique ability to self-renew and their developmental potential to form all cell lineages in the body. Traditional techniques for generating hESC rely on surplus IVF embryos and are incompatible with the generation of genetically diverse, patient or disease specific stem cells. Recently, it was reported that adult human skin cells could be induced to revert back to earlier stages of development and exhibit properties of authentic hES cells. The exact method for "reprogramming" has not been optimized but currently involves putting multiple genes into skin cells and then exposing the cells to specific chemical environments tailored to hES cell growth. While these cells appear to have similar developmental potential as hES cells, they are not derived from human embryos. To distinguish these reprogrammed cells from the embryonic sourced hES cells, they are termed induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Validating and optimizing the reprogramming method would prove very useful for the generation of individual cell lines from many different patients to study the nature and complexity of disease. In addition, the problems of immune rejection for future therapeutic applications of this work will be greatly relieved by being able to generate reprogrammed cells from individual patients.
PI
Fred Gage
INSTITUTE
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
STATE
California
AMOUNT
$1,737,720.00
AWARD DATE
2008 June
GRANT TYPE
New Cell Lines