iPS cells: New applications for metabolic liver diseases

Abstract

Gaining insight into the biology of human stem cells and the early embryonic development helps us to generate new ways for generation of tissue-specific cells from embryonic stem cells or other pluripotent stem cell resources. The landmark studies from Shinya Yamanaka and others opened a new era in stem cell biology, by providing a technology that allows the generation of pluripotent stem cells from patients' cells and, thus, allowing the generation of disease-specific stem cells. But in their pluripotent stage those stem cells cannot be readily used for studies of the disease phenotype and improved differentiation protocols need to be applied to get a disease-specific cell phenotype. Combining these two major advances in the field of stem cell biology, new approaches for studying metabolic liver diseases in correlation to each patient's symptoms are available, which provide a breakthrough in new drug target research or individual gene therapy.