Generation and Characterization of Patient-Specific Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell for Disease Modeling.

One major hurdle to the development of effective treatments to many diseases is the lack of suitable human model systems. The ability to reprogram human somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) offers an excellent opportunity to generate human disease models with primary cells. Currently, several methods to generate iPSC lines exist, and iPSC can be generated from various tissue sources including skin fibroblasts, blood, hair follicles, dental tissue, and urine. In this chapter we describe the generation and characterization of iPSC from blood or fibroblast on a routine base and focus on the integration-free methodologies.