Breakthrough discoveries: how iPS cells are changing stem cell science

When the Japan-based Alliance Forum Foundation brought its meeting to San Francisco last Friday it had two goals. The non-profit wanted to deepen the long tradition of collaboration between Japan and the U.S. and to honor Shinya Yamanaka, who won the Nobel Prize last year and who bridges the two countries with labs at Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco.

Throughout the day Yamanaka’s prize-winning idea for reprogramming adult cells into embryonic-like stem cells was referred to as game changing for all of biology. Those induced Pluripotent Stem cells, or iPS cells, were lauded as valuable research tools today and revolutionary therapies in the not too distant future.

Mahendra Rao, director of the NIH Center for Regenerative Medicine, likened iPS technology to PCR, polymerase chain reaction, a chemical trick invented 30 years ago that lets scientist amplify any desired set of genes for study. This empowered countless opportunities to ask questions about the function of genes. He said biology is viewed as pre-PCR and post-PCR, and he added that iPS is causing a similar paradigm shift. In particular he noted the opportunity to create personalized cells that can have their genes edited or corrected, if they have an inherited error.

Sandy Williams, the president of the Gladstone Institutes, ran through a scenario for how iPS cells can save society billions of dollars. He suggested that the ability to make iPS cells — and in turn nerve cells — from patients with Alzheimer’s Disease will provide such a valuable platform for drug screening that finding a drug to treat the dementia was inevitable. If such a drug was just 50 percent effective, he said it would save the U.S. $540 billion a year in costs associated with the disease by 2050.

Shortly after Sandy spoke, Nancy Stagliano, CEO of biotech company iPierian, provided strong support for his premise. She said that within 12 months the company expects to begin a clinical trail with an antibody therapy identified with an Alzheimer’s patient’s iPS cells.

All of CIRM’s grants can be sorted by the type of cell used and you can read about CIRM grants using iPS cells here.

One of the earlier speakers made a fitting tribute to another game-changing technology and the couple who made it happen, Leonard and Leonore Herzenberg, always known on the Stanford campus when I was there as just Len and Lee. Kenichi Arai said that the cell sorting machines they invented and continued to perfect over the years brought drug development to the cellular level and made much of stem cell science possible. Len died the week before the conference, but Lee was able to attend. Stanford’s obituary for Len has more about their discovery.

Don Gibbons