The Scintillon Institute's First Publication in Scientific Reports
Posted by Scintillon Institute on September 14, 2012
The Scintillon Institute's first publication, "Feeder-Free Derivation of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells with Messenger RNA," by Jiwu Wang has been published in the new Nature family journal Scientific Reports.
The therapeutic promise of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) has spurred efforts to circumvent genome alteration when reprogramming somatic cells to pluripotency. Our mRNA method uniquely affords unprecedented control over reprogramming factor (RF) expression while obviating a cleanup phase to purge residual traces of vector.
Currently, mRNA-based reprogramming is relatively laborious due to the need to transfect daily for ~2 weeks to induce pluripotency, and requires the use of feeder cells that add complexity and variability to the procedure while introducing a route for contamination with non-human-derived biological material. We accelerated the mRNA reprogramming process through stepwise optimization of the RF cocktail and leveraged these kinetic gains to establish a feeder-free, xeno-free protocol which slashes the time, cost and effort involved in iPSC derivation.