Myocardial Reprogramming Medicine: The Development, Application, and Challenge of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Figure 4

The potential applications and challenges of iPSCs in cardiac regenerative medicine. iPSCs are a cell therapy strategy for replacing lost or damaged cardiac tissues. They can be generated from patient specific somatic cells and are capable of generating large numbers of unambiguous cardiomyocytes using defined protocols. The major challenges in the current translational studies are concerns about the specificity of function maturation, low efficiency, immunogenicity, and safety of iPSCs. In addition to their applications in cell therapy, iPSC-derived cardiovascular cells provide an important in vitro tool for modeling cardiac diseases and drug screening. Clinical-grade HLA cell banking is one strategy being developed to minimize the risk of immunogenicity of iPSCs.