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. 2011 Oct;2(5):197-210.
doi: 10.1177/2042018811420198.

The prospect of induced pluripotent stem cells for diabetes mellitus treatment

Andreas Soejitno  1 , Pande Kadek Aditya Prayudi
Affiliations

The prospect of induced pluripotent stem cells for diabetes mellitus treatment

Andreas Soejitno et al. Ther Adv Endocrinol Metab. 2011 Oct.

Abstract

A continuous search for a permanent cure for diabetes mellitus is underway with several remarkable discoveries over the past few decades. One of these is the potential of pancreatic stem/progenitor cells to rejuvenate functional β cells. However, the existence of these cell populations is still obscure and a lack of phenotype characterization hampers their use in clinical settings. Cellular reprogramming through induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology can become an alternative strategy to generate insulin-producing cells in a relatively safe (autologous-derived cells, thus devoid of rejection risk) and efficient way (high cellular proliferation) but retain a precise morphological and genetic composition, similar to that of the native β cells. iPS cell technology is a technique of transducing any cell types with key transcription factors to yield embryonic-like stem cells with high clonogenicity and is able to give rise into all cell lineages from three germ layers (endoderm, ectoderm, and mesoderm). This approach can generate β-like pancreatic cells that are fully functional as proven by either in vitro or in vivo studies. This novel proof-of-concept stem cell technology brings new expectations on applying stem cell therapy for diabetes mellitus in clinical settings.

Keywords: cellular reprogramming; diabetes mellitus; induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells; pancreatic β cells.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest in preparing this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
In vitro differentiation protocol that guaides the differentiation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into insulin-producing β cells.(A) Stepwise differentiation of iPs cells onto insulin-producing cells.(B) combination of factors used to guide the differentiation, (C) specific markes used ot evaluate the corresponding stage of differentiation. (Adapted from Zhang et al. [2009a]).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Multifaceted problems of generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells as the source for pancreatic β-like cells transplantation and the potential strategies to overcome.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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