Final Report Summary - RSM-MICROSPHERE-IPSC (Novel Strategies for Microsphere-Mediated Cellular Control - A Technology to generate induced pluripotent stem cells for Regenerative Medicine)
The generation of iPS cells has a tremendous impact in the potential development of cell therapies replacement strategies for a wide range of human diseases. So far, with available transfection methods, the efficiency of reprogramming hasn´t been higher than 1 %, consequently, the development of a novel transfection agent that achieves higher efficiency of reprogramming is of big impact. The generation of patient-specific iPS cells will have a significant impact on the study of human diseases and on the treatment of these diseases using “personalized” regenerative medicine. For instance, skin cells can be obtained from patients with a particular disease, reprogrammed, and examined in the laboratory to determine how they differ from cells of healthy individuals. Such cells constitute invaluable tools for understanding disease mechanisms and so provide new opportunities to develop medical therapies. As a representative example of the huge number of important applications of iPS cells, the long waiting list of patients needing a organ transplant could be dramatically reduced by building the desired tissue from iPS cells obtained from the patient´s cells and, even more important, avoiding the huge problem of organ rejection by the patient. Moreover, iPS cells are also a great hope for drug development.
In general the development of a technology for the efficient delivery of DNA and protein is of huge interest for a huge scientific community. Many research groups of international recognized prestigious based their foundings in the use of an efficient and safe method of transfection to be able to express or silence specific genes involucrated in crucial cellular pathways related to severe diseases that our society is suffering. Additionally, research with iPS cells is one of the latest breakthroughs in biology and medicine. This research project has offered a new advance and step change in current cellular delivery techniques and as such offers significant benefit to European excellence and competitiveness. The benefit of carrying out this research is that it will allow the EU to gain a major foothold in the area of DNA and protein cellular delivery, an area which is undoubtedly now being dominated by the USA. Such technology is crucial to underpin new advances in the areas such as cellular re-programming, protein functional analysis and systems and synthetic biology.