4.3 IPSCs
The appearance of IPSCs has profound implications for the source of pluripotent stem cells. Because the access of embryonic stem cells is controversial, IPSC technology sidesteps a majority of the ethical issues, which results in the acceptability of stem-cell therapy for wide application. However, there is still a lack of understanding regarding IPSCs, which are currently not being used for clinical therapy. Current clinical application of IPSCs is restricted for cell models of diseases, which remain difficult for scientists to simulate in vitro. Because patients’ somatic cells can revert back to pluripotent stem cells after utilization of IPSC technology, then under the current steering, normal somatic cells can become model cells. Considering this characterization, IPSC technology is an ideal method for acquiring model cells through patients’ somatic cells because it does not cause obvious damage to patients. Sa et al. compared IPSC-derived ECs and native pulmonary ECs of iPAH patients in order to investigate the feasibility of IPSC-derived cells. The results showed that two types of cells manifest a similar phenotype. This result indicates that enormous progress has been made, because whether sugen, hypoxia, or MCT-induced PAH has a certain gap with iPAH, the easier method to derive human-source disease model cells, which is a huge leap for exploring the real mechanisms of iPAH(Sa et al., 2017).
In the past 2 years, IPSC therapy trials in patients have also been established. However, all IPSC clinical therapy trials are still in the recruiting stage. Only after a session of completed research will we be finally able to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of IPSC therapy and then consider whether IPSC therapy can finally become a feasible treatment for human diseases.