NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute is collaborating with the National Institutes of Health’s Undiagnosed Disease Program to create stem cell lines from patient’s cells that can be used to model and study their diseases in vitro.
NYSCF said yesterday that it plans to use its NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array to generate stem cell lines from 100 patients in the UDP and to work with UDP investigators to understand these rare diseases, and potentially find ways to treat them.
The UDP is a trans-NIH initiative, managed by the National Human Genome Research Institute, the NIH Office of Rare Diseases Research, and the NIH Clinical Center, that brings together multidisciplinary teams of scientists and clinicians to try to discover the cause of diseases in select patients with disorders that are difficult to diagnose.
NYSCF is using the array to develop a collection of induced pluripotent stem cell lines from UDP patients that will replicate human disease models. These scalable iPS cells will be standardized and will carry a patient’s genetic information, enabling researchers to compare them to their patient’s adult cells, NYSCF said.
"This collaborative effort has the potential to create new disease models that will reveal whether candidate gene variants are responsible for a patient's disease," William Gahl, director of the NIH UDP, said in a statement.