High-Efficiency Cellular Reprogramming and Differentiation with Microfluidics

Drug development is a time-consuming process with high failure rate. Moreover, even multiple approved drugs show patient-to-patient variability as for efficacy and toxicity response.

We report that the efficiency of reprogramming human somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) can be dramatically improved in a microfluidic environment. microliter-volume confined environment resulted in a 50-fold increase in efficiency over traditional reprogramming by delivery of synthetic modified mRNAs encoding transcription factors. We found that in these small volumes, extracellular components of the TGF-b and other signaling pathways exhibited temporal regulation that appears critical to acquisition of pluripotency. The high quality and purity of the resulting hiPSCs allowed direct differentiation into functional hepatocyte- and cardiomyocyte- like cells in the same platform without additional expansion.

These results is step forward the high-throughput generation of patient-specific human pluripotent stem cells.