The research group of Megumu K. Saito (Associate professor, Department of Clinical Application, CiRA) and Tatsutoshi Nakahata (Professor, Department of Clinical Application, CiRA) has established a method for robust and highly-efficient method for differentiation of human iPS cells into the immune cells such as dendritic cells and macrophages. The scientific paper was published in the U.S. scientific journal PLOS ONE (2013; 8(4):e59243).

 

iPS cells are undifferentiated pluripotent cells that propagate infinitely. The development of immune cells from these pluripotent cells is of particular interest because it would provide an unlimited source of these cells for clinical applications such as cancer immunotherapies and the examination of disease pathologies using those immune cells derived from disease-specific iPS cells.

 

Although the methods for hematopoietic differentiation from ES and iPS cells using embryonic body or feeder co-culture systems have already been established, these methods usually depend on xenogeneic feeder cells and/or animal- or human-derived serum, and therefore have a relatively poor-reproducibility. The present research describes a novel serum- and feeder-free method that robustly and repetitively produces dendritic cells and macrophages from human iPS cells. The current culture system simply propagated progenitor cells in 2-dimentional culture without passage or sorting, and dendritic cells and macrophages could be obtained repetitively from all of the five ES and iPS cell clones tested. In several functional assays such as cytokine assay and antigen uptake assay, dendritic cells and macrophages derived from iPS cells were almost functionally comparable to their primary counterparts.

 

The present research group has already started the researches for the disease pathologies and drug discovery in immunological disorders such as autoimmune diseases, immunodeficiencies and autoinflammatory syndromes by using the dendritic cells and macrophages derived from disease specific iPS cells according to the present method.

 

The present research was carried out in partnership between CiRA, Kyoto University Graduate School of medicine, and Yokohama City University Graduate School of medicine.

Immune cells derived from iPS cells.

"Robust and Highly-Efficient Differentiation of Functional Monocytic Cells from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells under Serum- and Feeder Cell-Free Conditions"

Masakatsu D. Yanagimachi, Akira Niwa, Takayuki Tanaka, Fumiko Honda-Ozaki, Seiko Nishimoto,Yuuki Murata, Takahiro Yasumi, Jun Ito, Shota Tomida, Koichi Oshima, Isao Asaka, Hiroaki Goto,Toshio Heike, Tatsutoshi Nakahata and Megumu K. Saito