Disease modeling and cell based therapy with iPSC: future therapeutic option with fast and safe application

Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology has shown us great hope to treat various human diseases which have been known as untreatable and further endows personalized medicine for future therapy without ethical issues and immunological rejection which embryonic stem cell (hES) treatment has faced. It has been agreed that iPSCs knowledge can be harnessed from disease modeling which mimics human pathological development rather than trials utilizing conventional rodent and cell lines. Now, we can routinely generate iPSC from patient specific cell sources, such as skin fibroblast, hair follicle cells, patient blood samples and even urine containing small amount of epithelial cells. iPSC has both similarity and dissimilarity to hES. iPSC is similar enough to regenerate tissue and even full organism as ES does, however what we want for therapeutic advantage is limited to regenerated tissue and lineage specific differentiation. Depending on the lineage and type of cells, both tissue memory containing (DNA rearrangement/epigenetics) and non-containing iPSC can be generated. This makes iPSC even better choice to perform disease modeling as well as cell based therapy. Tissue memory containing iPSC from mature leukocytes would be beneficial for curing cancer and infectious disease. In this review, the benefit of iPSC for translational approaches will be presented.