Induced pluripotent stem cells therapy

Ronaghi M, Erceg S, Moreno-Manzano V, Stojkovic M (2010) Challenges of stem cell therapy for spinal cord injury Human embryonic stem cells, endogenous neural stem cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells Stem Cells 28 93-99... 

Robinton, D. A. and Daley, G.Q. 2012. The promise of induced pluripotent stem cells in research and therapy. Nature, 481 295-305. 

Directed differentiation towards retinal lineages has also been investigated for application in cell-based therapies to treat retinopathies and degenerative disorders such as age-related macular dystrophy. The production of retinal cells has recently been reported from ESCs and induced pluripotent stem cells with a cocktail of small molecules in serum-free conditions an ALK inhibitor, a Rho kinase inhibitor and a casein kinase inhibitor. ... 

Shi, Y. 2009. Induced pluripotent stem cells, new tools for drug discovery and new hope for stem cell therapies. Curr Mol Pharmacol, 2,15-8. 

The questions that needs to be answered with ES-derived cell therapies are in general whether they have been purified sufficiently to reduce the risk of tumor formation in humans, whether immune suppression will be required (as existing human ESC lines have limited ethnic and immunological diversity (Laurent et al. 2010)), and whether they can be generated in sufficient number for human therapies. Some of these issues, such as immunological compatibility can be addressed through the use of inducible pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are described below. 

Functional cardiomyocytes derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. Circ. Res., 104, e30-e41. Zhang, Y., Sievers, R. E., Prasad, M., Mirsky, R., Shih, H., Wong, M. L., Angeli, F. S. et al. 2010. Timing of bone marrow cell therapy is more important than repeated injections after myocardial infarction. Cardiovasc. Pathol, 20(4), 204-212. 

Nishikawa S, Goldstein R, Nierras C. 2008. The promise of human induced pluripotent stem cells for research and therapy. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 9 725-9. 

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells represent another source of human cardiomyocytes. Adult mouse and human fibroblasts can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state by overexpression of specific transcription factors. The reprogrammed cells resemble hES cells and can further be differentiated into a number of functional cells including cardiomyocytes (Yoshida and Yamanaka, 2010, Zhang et al., 2009). Recently, an exciting study successfully showed that instead of reprogramming to ES cells, mouse fibroblasts can be directly reprogrammed into cardiomyocytes (leda et al, 2010). Similar observations with human cells will accelerate the potential of iPS cells toward chnical myocardial therapy. 

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