I thought this is an interesting concept. Obviously, it’s for wealthy people right now, but the bigger story is that the cost of producing iPSCs has come down dramatically.
There’s already evidence to suggest this treatment improves function in mouse and rodent models.
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Neo
#2
Totally. Any sense of the price?
No it just said thousands in the article. But, still this is a decent step forward. I would absolutely do it if money were no object.
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So I did a bit more digging and found this:
I Peace reportedly offers clinical-grade iPSC generation and banking for under $20,000, with some packages even lower depending on the services included.
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Neo
#5
Thx, what’s the source for that?
Since you can reprogram almost any cell, from any age, into an iPSC, what is the advantage of banking it? If this technology can actually “make it” (which is doubtful IMO), you could simply donate a blood sample when you actually need it.
I carry out research in the iPSC field and I’d qualify myself as pretty knowledgeable in the area. Personally I don’t believe much in these ideas. Temporary in vivo reprogramming is touted as some anti-aging phenomenon, and I get the idea, but I don’t think there’s any practical way to implement it. Current studies have to use gene edited mouse strains where 4 reprogramming factors (OKSM) are induced by a drug. It is achievable in cell culture with some small molecules, and you can kinda do it in vivo with viruses, but both of those are very risky. After all, the last thing you want is an immortal stem cell with unlimited proliferation and differentiation potential running loose in your body.
As for transplanting the iPSCs, you would need to differentiate them first, and frankly we are still quite poor at doing that. We can generate neutron-like cells, or cardiomyocyte-like cells, but not mature adult-like cells. What we differentiate are more like fetal cells, which makes sense because that is what embryonic stem cells turn into during development. After that, you have years of growth, all the way through puberty to reach adulthood, and we have no idea how to recapitulate that in vitro or on an accelerated time scale. Believe me, we are a very long way off from being able to grow a heart or liver in the lab, despite what juicy news headlines and press releases like to promote.
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I totally get it. I guess the thinking is the younger you bank your cells the less reprogramming needed… maybe. That’s just my ignorant guess. Interesting that you research it. I know we’re really far away from real therapies. I think what’s interesting is the significantly lowered cost of producing them. Seems like a step towards mass production. That seems like it would be a good thing.
Sounds like a great business idea. I’m going to launch one along the same lines. My product is going to be a bunch of baloons. I send you the empty baloon, you blow into it, and send it back to me. I label it with your name, and when you’re old, you can come back and get a dose of your young breath into you. Sort of like the young blood idea that BJ is going with, but centered on the breath - it can even have some semi-mystical Eastern magic of breathing therapies. I’ll sell it cheap - each baloon only $10K. Probably as useful to you as the iPSC, and useful to my bank account. YMMV.
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To my knowledge, there isn’t much difference. Most cells can be reprogrammed into iPSCs, even “very differentiated” ones like cardiomyocytes. (The exceptions are those lacking a nucleus, such as red blood cells which can’t be reprogrammed.) However, I’m not aware of any real differences in reprogramming peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from younger or older people. They would all be reset back to the same iPSC state.
In reality, the reprogramming efficiency is quite low, and only a small percentage of cells will be successfully reprogrammed. But, at that point, they expand clonally, so you only need a small number anyway.
A lot of the expense is in the characterisation and proving that you actually have iPSCs. There are certain tests, like surface markers, gene expression, and differentiation capacity that are usually shown to demonstrate successful reprogramming.
And as I mentioned, the major challenge is the differentiation into your cells of interest. So having something banked maybe saves a couple of weeks for reprogramming and characterisation, but it doesn’t help at all for the most problematic part of using iPSCs for therapy.
IMO, the major value of iPSCs is for personalised drug screening etc. Let’s say a person gets cancer and needs chemo, You could, for example, take peripheral blood cells form a person, reprogram to iPSCs, differentiate to cardiomyocyte(-like) cells, and we could then verify which drugs might cause arrhythmia in your heart. We could also generate iPSC-derived hepatocytes, and see which drugs metabolise faster or slower by the liver. To my knowledge, Shinya Yamanaka has also stated in interview that he thinks this is more promising and useful than iPSC transplantation approaches.
It’s great news to see things evolving so fast. Last time I looked into iPSCs it was extremely difficult to produce them.
My thought exactly. Not to mention that if you need them at some point in the future, when time comes the technology to make them will have improved more potentially making the banked iPSCs obsolete. In any case, I agree with you that this has little practical use now.
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