While at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, iPierian scientist Dr. John Dimos led a team whose work on iPS cell reprogramming was cited as part of the 2008 "Breakthrough of the Year" by Science magazine.
iPierian’s approach involving the reprogramming and differentiation of cells derived from patients with specific diseases offers significant advantages for drug discovery over the use of human embryonic stem cells. While cells taken from human embryos can also be differentiated into desired cell lineages, the embryo from which such cells were created offers no information about biology, pathology, or medical history. Human embryonic stem cells cannot provide the required level of disease-specific and contextual information needed to develop targeted drugs and diagnostics for specific patient populations.
The iPierian approach begins by rigorously selecting a patient population to represent a disease. The company's iPS cells associate genotype with disease and are associated with contextual information that includes the pathology, medical history and demographics directly associated with the patients within each disease cohort. The iPierian platform will reprogram skin cells from these patients into iPS cells, and then differentiate these iPS cells into functional disease relevant cells. These disease-relevant cells from carefully selected and stratified patient populations will in turn flow into an integrated drug discovery platform to identify new targets and develop new therapeutics. This iPierian advantage will revolutionize the nature of drug discovery as it is conducted today by putting patients at the very forefront of the drug discovery process.