Culturing human cellsISTOCKPHOTO.COM
Move over mice. Human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are making strides to become the next best thing in translational research—disease-specific human cells grown in a dish. Using a variety of approaches, researchers have generated stem cells from mature adult cells of disease-afflicted patients and subsequently differentiated them into the various tissue types involved in the disease.
“The idea is that you can have a pluripotent stem cell line from a patient that already contains all the genetic background of the disease,” says Gustavo Mostoslavsky, a stem cell researcher at the Boston University School of Medicine. Now that the generation of iPS cells is “routine,” he adds, scientists can use the method to generate in vitro disease models, from which they can learn about molecular ...
