New Stem Cell Resource Created to Accelerate Human-based Research

Study in a Sentence: Researchers from the Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Initiative (HipSci.org) recently produced and characterized 711 stem cell lines derived from 301 healthy individuals to demonstrate that up to 46 percent of the differences observed between the functional traits of these cell lines can be explained by variations among normal individuals.

Healthy for Humans: This project provides the most comprehensively characterized bank of normal human stem cell lines to date for scientists to use to better model diseases and develop therapies for regenerative medicine.

Redefining Research: By assessing and understanding where normal variations of human-derived stem cell line traits originate this study allows scientists to accurately attribute variations in stem cell disease models resulting from pathological etiologies rather than from normal individual differences or procedurally induced differences.