ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) have been of central interest in biomedical research since the rst isolation of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) in 1998.1 PSCs have unique potential for novel therapies of degenerative diseases,2,3 due to their ability to dierentiate into cells of all three germ layers4,5 and their theoretical property of unlimited proliferation.6 Studying these cells advances the understanding of human developmental processes as well as cellular dierentiation processes. Furthermore, with the discovery of “induced” PSCs (iPSCs), new possibilities in the area of drug discovery and compound development have appeared: whereas hESCs can only be isolated from the inner cell mass of blastocysts during the early development of embryos usually created by in vitro fertilization, iPSCs are articially generated by epigenetic reprogramming techniques from somatic cells.7,8 is oers for the rst time the possibility of producing patient-or disease-specic PSCs and integrating specic mutations (e.g., using Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated protein [CRISPR/Cas]-technology9) to generate model cells for compound screenings. New cell handling tools (e.g., surface-based hanging drop cultivation10) will enable singlecell diagnostic and new high-throughput/high-content screening for drug discovery. In the future, PSCs may even be used to replace damaged or nonfunctional cells and tissue, enabling personalized regenerative medicine.
