Bottlenecks of the clinical development of pluripotent stem cell based therapy

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can self-renew for extended period of time in culture and retain the pluripotency to differentiate into all cell types in human body. Therefore, as a renewable source of therapeutically valuable cell types, hESCs hold great promise for human cell therapy. Consistent with this finding, significant progress has been achieved in establishing the conditions necessary to differentiate hESCs into several lineages of biologically active cells, including cardiomyocytes for treating heart diseases, oligodendroglial progenitors for spinal cord injury, pancreatic β cells for Type I diabet…