Reprogramming of Human Peripheral Blood Cells to Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Abstract

Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent cells derived from the inner cell mass of the developing embryo that have the capacity to differentiate into every cell type of the adult (Evans and Kaufman, 1981, Martin, 1981, Martin and Evans, 1975 and Thomson et al., 1998). The generation of patient-specific pluripotent cells is therefore an important goal of regenerative medicine. A major step to achieve this was the recent discovery that ectopic expression of defined transcription factors induces pluripotency in somatic cells (Lowry et al., 2008, Park et al., 2008b, Takahashi et al., 2007 and Yu et al., 2007). Until now, the most common source from which to derive human iPSCs has been skin fibroblasts (Lowry et al., 2008, Park et al., 2008a, Park et al., 2008b, Takahashi et al., 2007 and Yu et al., 2009). However, the requirement for skin biopsies and the need to expand fibroblast cells for several passages in vitro represent a hurdle that must be overcome to make iPSC technology broadly applicable. Peripheral blood can be utilized as an easily accessible source of patient tissue for reprogramming. Here we derived iPSCs from frozen human peripheral blood samples. Some of the iPSCs had rearrangements of the T cell receptor (TCR), indicating that T cells can be reprogrammed to pluripotency.