Laurence Daheron, Phd, Head of the iPS Core Facility at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, discusses autologous iPS and HLA-matched embryonic stem cells.
Transcript:
The only advantage I can see in using human iPS is the fact that you can do autologous. You can take blood cells from a patient, make the iPS, differentiate them and put them back in the same patient. That’s the beauty of it. But the cost… it’s going to be insane. So there is no way we can do this in large scale. So then, between the two, I would rather start with human embryonic stem cells and find some HLA matched, hum, a collection of human embryonic stem cells that can cover at least a large part of the population, through HLA matching, and the reason why I would rather work or start with human embryonic stem cells is that the chance of genetic instability in these cells is much lower. The way they are generated compared to IPS : much lower.