Also known as reprogrammed stem cells, iPSCs are derived from somatic cells taken from adults, and offer researchers a way to examine the development of diseases.
But as biologists have discovered in the past few years since iPSCs were first generated by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006, coaxing the cells to proliferate without acquiring mutations has proved to be a challenge.
For an academic scientist, Lee Rubin at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) has a great deal of biotech industry experience, and this has inspired some ingenious experiments with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for disease modeling and drug discovery.