2018 SLAS Americas Sample Management Symposium

Since their initial generation in 2007 human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) have been used to model human development and disease progression, for drug screening and for toxicology testing. It is now possible to reprogram a wide range of cell types allowing a greater diversity of hiPSC to be generated and increasing the availability of hiPSC containing either specific mutations or from subjects with diseases that do not have known genotype. However, the diverse genetic background of the human race has hampered the usefulness of iPSC. Currently, controls often consist of age and sex-matched non-affected subjects or non-affected family members. The use of the CRISPR (clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas system can create isogenic cell lines that will serve as better controls and help eliminate effects that are due to genetic variance rather than a biological mechanism. At RUCDR/Infinite Biologics we have developed a high throughput, cost efficient workflow for generating hiPSC from many different types of source cells and using CRISPR/Cas9 to genetically these cell lines, creating isogenic lines. Using this strategy, we have generated pairs of iPSC lines that are footprint free, meet all of the criteria necessary to certify the cell lines as pluripotent and use to better understand mechanisms of human disease and development.