NISSIM BENVENISTY, RUSSO E (2005) FOLLOW THE MONEY—THE POLITICS OF EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH. PLOS BIOL 3(7): e234. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030234About four years ago, Jay Tischfield, the director of RUCDR Infinite Biologics, a long-standing biorepository at Rutgers University, found himself sitting on a gold mine. RUCDR had recently gotten into the business of banking and distributing induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines. This was still early days in iPSC derivation, only a few years after scientists had figured out how to turn skin cells into cells capable of differentiating into a wide variety of different cell types.
But not long into this new endeavor, “something important happened in the field,” Tischfield recalls. Researchers reported that they could induce pluripotency from blood cells. It just so happened that RUCDR was in possession of a massive collection of blood cell lines, each with a heap of information on the donor. “There we were, standing on what is perhaps one of the world’s, if not the world’s, largest collection of genetically defined . . . lymphocytes from literally almost a half a million subjects,” he says. “And it turned out these were fantastic for making iPSCs.” Suddenly, the opportunities for iPSC derivation and banking seemed endless.
The question, of course, was how to pick which lines to derive iPSCs from. To bank them all would ...
