Applications of patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells; focused on disease modeling, drug screening and therapeutic potentials for liver disease

Abstract

The recent advances in the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) research have significantly changed our perspectives on regenerative medicine by providing researchers with a unique tool to derive disease-specific stem cells for study. In this review, we describe the human iPSC generation from developmentally diverse origins (i.e. endoderm-, mesoderm-, and ectoderm- tissue derived human iPSCs) and multistage hepatic differentiation protocols, and discuss both basic and clinical applications of these cells including disease modeling, drug toxicity screening/drug discovery, gene therapy and cell replacement therapy.

Keywords: Disease Modeling; Drug Screening; Liver Disease; Stem Cell.

Figure 1

Potential applications of human iPSCs for liver diseases. iPSC technology can be potentially utilized in disease modeling, pathogenesis research, drug discovery, gene therapy and cell replacement therapy. Genetic mutations can be corrected by gene targeting approaches before or after reprogramming. Hepatic cells differentiated from patient specific iPSCs can be used for disease modeling and transplantation purposes.