Scaling up iPS cells

A Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center team has conducted one of the first large-scale screens of a small molecule library using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells.¹ The approach was applied to neuronal cells derived from patients with familial dysautonomia and provides early evidence of its potential for identifying new leads.

Separately, a public-private partnership led by Roche and the University of Oxford is aiming to establish a repository comprising 1,500 induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells-triplicate samples from 500 patients with diabetes or a wide range of neurological diseases-in an effort to provide a tool for finding new targets and therapeutic leads...