The Promise of Cell Therapy: Is History Repeating Itself

Copyright: © 2013 Phinney DG. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The iPS “revolution” has dominated most aspects of stem cell biology over the past five years culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Dr. John B. Gurdon of the University of Cambridge and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University for their seminal contributions to this field. Dr. Gurdon was the first to successfully generate living tadpoles via somatic cell nuclear transfer [1,2] and Dr. Yamanaka demonstrated that somatic cell reprogramming to an embryonic state could be achieved by ectopic expression of four genes [3]. Indeed, Yamanaka’s achievement validated the work of many scientists who painstakingly delineated the roadmap of gene regulatory networks activated during embryogenesis and responsible for establishing a pluripotent state [4-8].