In an increasingly geriatric population, in which elderly people frequently face chronic diseases and degenerative conditions, cell therapies as part of novel regenerative medicine approaches are of great interest. Even though today's cell therapies mostly rely on adult stem cells like the mesenchymal stem cells or primary somatic cells, pluripotent stem cells represent an enormously versatile cell model to explore possible new avenues in the field of regenerative medicine due to their capacity to grow indefinitely and to differentiate into the desired cell types. The discovery of reprogramming somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells augmented the pool of applicable cell entities so that researchers nowadays can resort to embryonic stem cells, but also to a plethora of patient- and disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells. The ease of targeted genome engineering is an additional benefit that allows using pluripotent stem cells for disease modeling, drug discovery, and the development of cell therapies. However, the task is still demanding as the generation of subpopulations and a sufficient cell maturation for some cell entities have yet to be achieved. Likewise, even though for some applications the cells of interest can be produced in the large-scale dimensions and purity that are required for clinical purposes, proper integration, and function in the host tissue remain challenging. Nonetheless, the immense progress that has been made over the last decades warrants the prominent role of pluripotent stem cells in regenerative medicine as in vitro models to broaden our knowledge of disease onset/progression and treatment as well as in vivo as a substitution of damaged/aged tissue.
Keywords: Cell therapy; Clinical translation; Differentiation; Embryonic stem cells; Induced pluripotent stem cells.