The annual meeting of the Society for Laboratory Automation
and Screening (SLAS) always provides an excellent venue for BioTek scientists to
present the work accomplished over the past year. However, it also provides an opportunity for
learning given the concentration of experts from a wide range of scientific
areas with a focus on streamlining processes. While reading a recent article in
Drug Discovery News the topic of one of the program offerings drew my attention – a stem
cell-focused short course. It wasn’t just the topic but rather the disclaimer
that the course would not be focused on therapeutics but on methods to
manipulate and culture induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to assure
reproducible results when used in downstream processes.
This brings up an interesting point: an aspect of stem cell
research that is often overshadowed by discussions of stem cells as therapeutic
agents, is the use of cells derived from patients exhibiting a specific disease
state, in order to model the disease more
effectively for drug discovery efforts. While the process of reprogramming
adult cells and subsequent reprogramming efforts can be time consuming, the
resulting physiologically relevant cells could be a tremendous asset to both industry
and academic research.
The reprogramming of adult cells to a pluripotent state has
been well publicized over the past years.
Now researchers are focusing on standardized methods for derivation,
maintenance, characterization and differentiation of these induced pluripotent
stem cells from human sources in a highly reproducible manner. Currently, the
process is rather tedious and time-consuming, but great strides are being made
to introduce new technologies to simplify these processes such as the use of
flow cytometry and FACS for enrichment of cell populations.
Given the focus of SLAS, it will be interesting to see what
new strategies have recently been developed using automated methods for
derivation, selection and characterization of reprogrammed iPSCs as well as the
downstream methods of differentiation and enrichment of target cell types.
Furthermore, as the processes become more readily accessible it will be
interesting to see how well reprogrammed cells derived from adult cells from heritable
disease states accurately model the disease.
By: BioTek Instruments, Peter J. Brescia, Jr., MSc, MBA, Applications Scientist
By: BioTek Instruments, Peter J. Brescia, Jr., MSc, MBA, Applications Scientist
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