The Current State of Therapeutic Development Involving Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

A little more than a decade has passed since the development of a simple cell reprogramming approach that reliably created pluripotent stem cells from ordinary somatic cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells. These stem cells are very similar, near identical in fact, to the embryonic stem cells that were previously the only reliable source of cells capable of forming any cell type in the body. Arguably the most important aspect of induced pluripotency is not the promise of the ability to generate patient-matched cells for regenerative therapies and tissue engineering of replacement organs, but rather that it is a low cost, robust procedure. It is easily adopted by any laboratory capable of basic cell biology operations, without the requirement of any complicated new knowledge or techniques. It thus spread very rapidly, and many labs were working on further development within a year or two of the first paper published on the topic. Nonetheless, the highly regulated (and thus enormously expensive) process of clinical development proceeds at its own slow pace, no matter the ease or difficulty of the underlying technology. Trials of regenerative therapies based on induced pluripotency are taking place, but only in recent years, and only a few of them. Beyond the regulatory burden, this is also a symptom of a broader hold-up in stem cell therapies in general, in that the cells transplanted by the vast majority of first generation therapies do not survive and engraft ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs