Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy – From Bench to Bed

The term stem cell includes a large class of cells defined by their ability to give rise to vari‐ ous mature progeny while maintaining the capacity to self-renew. Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) were first isolated from the inner mass of late blastocysts in mice by Sir Martin J. Evans and Matthew Kaufman (Evans & Kaufman, 1981) and independently by Gail R. Mar‐ tin (Martin, 1981). Later, it became possible to obtain ESCs from non-human primates and humans. In 1998, James Thomson and his team reported the first successful derivation of hu‐ man ESC lines (Thomson et al., 1998), thus extending the great potential of ESCs by provid‐ ing the opportunity to develop stem cell-based therapies for human disease.