It’s endoderm...definitively!

Abstract

Evaluation of: D’Amour, KA, Agulnick AD, Eliazer S et al.: Efficient differentiation of human embryonic stem cells to definitive endoderm. Nat. Biotech. 23, 1534–1541 (2005) [1] . Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) offer great promise in the area of regenerative medicine because of their potential to generate vast numbers of transplantable cell types that can be used to cure degenerative diseases. The development of cell therapies for a wide variety of disease states has been severely hampered however, by the inability to control differentiation of hESCs. One area this problem applies to is the generation of pancreatic β-cells. Restoration of β-cell function in diabetic patients, by transplantation of β-cells derived from hESCs, is thought to have potential as a therapeutic strategy. A major problem however, in generating β-cells from hESCs, has been the inability to efficiently generate definitive endoderm – the precursor cell type that gives rise to pancreatic lineages in addition to those of the liver, lung, stomach, intestine and pharynx. In the absence of effective approaches that generate definitive endoderm (DE) in a controlled manner, the likelihood of producing sufficient numbers of β-cells for transplantation purposes is low. This problem appears to have been at least partially circumvented by D’Amour and co-workers who describe a simple, reliable method for the generation of DE from hESCs [1] . This report is likely to open the ‘doors of opportunity’ for the development of specified pancreatic cell types that have therapeutic potential.