The Masonic Medical Research Laboratory's new Stem Cell Center has achieved its first milestone with the generation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). The new Stem Cell Center is focused on creating for the first time human models of disease to gain pathophysiological insights into the basis for life-threatening inherited syndromes such as long QT (LQTS), short QT (SQTS) and Brugada (BrS) syndromes. These human arrhythmic in vitro models should prove valuable in the design of new drugs to treat these arrhythmic syndromes.

To generate the induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), Michael Xavier Doss Jesudoss at the MMRL made use of the recent breakthrough discovery involving reprogramming adult somatic cells into a pluripotent embryonic stem cell fate with the help of the transcriptional factors: Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-myc.

The figure shows MMRL's first patient specific iPS cell lines derived from human fibroblasts obtained with a skin biopsy. These iPS cell lines were derived by nuclefection. These cells can give rise to any phenotypic cells of almost all tissues of our human body including cardiomyocytes, neuronal cells and insulin producing beta cells of the islets of Langerhans. Thus iPS cell derived cells are clinically relevant and hold great potential for cell replacement therapy of heart failure, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease as well as diabetes.

MMRL is in the process of creating additional iPS cell lines from skin biopsy fibroblasts or blood lymphocytes isolated from patients with inherited life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias. Cardiomyocytes obtained from these iPS cells will serve as human in vitro models for the respective diseases, facilitating the design of novel and innovative approaches to therapy.