Nearly a decade after the first description of obtaining and differentiating human embryonic stem cells in 1998,1 the reports in 2007 of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from human tissues2'3 heralded a second era of human stem cell research that currently delivers many interesting new findings. iPSCs are normally produced by overexpres-sion of the OCT3/4, S0X2, KLF4, and c-MYC genes in human skin cells, followed by culturing techniques initially developed for keeping human embryonic stem cells undifferentiated. Subsequently, the iPSCs that now express a number of stem cell markers can be differentiated into the cell type of interest by dedicated methods that often include a phase of embryoid body formation. Two major applications of iPSCs were foreseen immediately.
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