Reprogramming human peripheral blood mononuclear cells to inducible pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC): An examination of the efficacy of different methods

Modeling a disease “in a dish,” a new research tool to study human heart disease mechanisms, is becoming as popular as more established techniques such as the use of transgenic mice. The primary practical challenge of this “disease in a dish” method is efficiently directing human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) differentiation into the desired lineages, with the major concern being the variability within hiPSC clones.To generate a reliable in vitro model for inherited cardiac diseases and address the variability problem, characteristics of hiPSCs derived from the blood of four human donors using both the episomal and Sendai virus reprogramming systems were examined. The hiPSC-cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) generated were then characterized according to their cardiac-specific gene expression properties. No differences were observed on the effect of the reprogramming system on expression of pluripotent genes in iPSCs but differences were observed in expression of cardiac specific genes in cardiomyocytes derived from those iPSCs despite a high variance in the analysis.