Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell, a Rising Star in Regenerative Medicine

The generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is a milestone in biomedical researches. With the iPS technology, mouse somatic cells could be reprogrammed into a pluripotent state similar to that of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) by overexpression of only several defined transcription factors. This technology also enables the successful generation of human iPSCs from various human somatic cells and therefore avoids the ethical conflicts of ESCs that are derived from human embryos. The iPSCs generated from somatic cells of patients are generally considered to be free of immune rejection in autogenous transplantation therapy, thus they hold great therapeutic potential for producing personalized regenerative medicine. Besides, the autologous iPSCs from patients and the subsequent differentiation can be directly used for the disease modeling and drug screening in dishes. Though holding invaluable therapeutic potential, the iPS technology also faces some challenges such as immunogenicity, oncogenicity, in vitro differentiation propensities, and genome or epigenome integrities, which must be carefully evaluated before clinical translation. In this chapter, we briefly summarize the history and progress of the iPSC researches and the application of iPSCs in regenerative medicine and disease modeling.