Human iPS cells have a great potential to be cell sources for regenerative medicine because of the promise of infinite self-renewal and the capability to differentiate into multiple cell types. This book focuses on another great potential of human iPS cells, which is the establishment of human disease models using patient-specific iPS cells. Human iPS cells can be easily obtained from a patient’s somatic cells and provide the entire information on the patient’s genome. Accordingly, we can generate disease models for inheritable diseases in cell culture dishes using iPS cells. This is a quite new technique but holds tremendous potential for our increased understanding of pathogenesis, and will then be the basis for novel drug development industries. All the authors are leading researchers in this field and they have reported many kinds of patient-derived iPS cells. In this book, they introduce the aspects that could be recapitulated in terms of disease modelling as well as further innovative findings such as novel pathogenetic insights and novel therapies.

One of the biggest challenges faced in medical research had been to create accurate and relevant models of human disease. A number of good animal models have been developed to understand the pathophysiology. However, not all of them reflect the human disorder, a classic case being Usher’s syndrome where the mutant mice do not have the same visual and auditory defects that patients face. There are others which have been even more difficult to model due to the multi-factorial nature of the condition and due to lack of discovery of a single causative gene such as age-related macular degeneration or Alzheimer’s syndrome. Thus a more relevant and accurate system will allow us to make better predictions on relevant therapeutic approaches. The discovery of human pluripotent stem cells in 1998 followed by the technological advances to reprogram somatic cells to pluripotent-stem cell-like cells in 2006 has completely revolutionized the way we can now think about modelling human development and disease. This now coupled with genome editing technologies such as TALENS and CRISPRs have now set us up to develop in vitro models both 2D as well as 3D organoids, which can more precisely reflect the disease in the patients. These combinatorial technologies are already providing us with better tools and therapeutics in drug discovery or gene therapy. This book summarizes both the technological advances in the field of generation of patient specific lines as well as various gene editing approaches followed by its applicability in various systems. The book will serve as a reference for the current state of the field as it: -Provides a comprehensive overview of the status of the field of patients derived induced pluripotent stem cells. -Describes the use of cardiac cells as a main featured component within the book. -Examines drug toxicity analysis as a working example throughout the book.

While most stem cell books focus on basic aspects and/or cell therapy, this book emphasizes the relevance of stem cells obtained from patients, the so-called “patients in a petri dish” as tools to investigate human genetic diseases for which there are no available effective treatment. Chapters embrace several examples of the use of iPS cell technology, a recent Nobel Prize-winning scientific breakthrough, to obtain patient-specific pluripotent cells from which many types of specialized cells involved in a particular disease can be generated, including psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, muscular dystrophies, laminopathies, among others. The text is a current and timely resource for postgraduate students, scientists and clinicians, interested in applications of this rapidly developing field of research in disease modeling, drug development, and emerging issues that it brings to regenerative medicine.

Stem cell based therapy is a 21st century approach of therapeutic intervention which epitomizes a shift from conventional symptomatic treatment strategy to addressing the root cause of the disease process. This is especially a hope for the patients suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer, diabetes, myocardial infarction and other diseases which have always been considered as incurable. Moreover, stem cells provide excellent in vitro disease models for drug development. This book is a compilation of the bench experience of experts from various research labs involved in the cutting edge area of research, describing the use of stem cells both as part of the combinatorial therapeutic intervention approach and as tools (disease model) during drug development.

There is hardly an area of research developing so quickly and raising so many promises as stem cell research. Adult, embryonic and recently available induced pluripotent stem cells not only foster our understanding of differentiation of endo-, ecto- and mesodermal lineages to all organs of the body, but foremost nourish the hope that cells grown in culture can be used for regeneration of diseased organs such as the heart damaged by myocardial infarction. This book focuses on perspectives of stem cells for regenerative therapy of cardiovascular diseases. Based on the EC consortium INELPY, it reviews the field and disseminates major outcomes of this project. Thus it introduces the reader to this fascinating area of research and incorporates very recent findings interesting to the expert, spanning the field from bench to bedside. The compilation of contributions is unique as there is yet no similar comprehensive overview combining stem cell research with preclinical and clinical evaluation as well as engineering of tissue patches for transplantation. As such it will be an invaluable source of information for all researchers in the stem cell and tissue regeneration field including bioengineers as well as for all clinicians interested in regenerative therapies, especially for ischemic cardiomyopathies.

To achieve cardiac regeneration using pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, researchers must understand iPS cell generation methods, cardiomyocyte differentiation protocols, cardiomyocyte characterization methods, and tissue engineering. This book presents the current status and future possibilities in cardiac regeneration using iPS cells. Written by top researchers who present new data in these fields, this book reviews cardiac cell therapy for ischemic heart disease and explores in vitro generation of efficacious platelets from iPS cells. It also discusses modeling arrhythmogenic heart disease with patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells.