Derivation of Clinical-Grade Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines from Erythroid Progenitor Cells in Xenofree Conditions.

One of the major hurdles in realizing the therapeutic potential of human-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) is the generation of clinical-grade iPSC lines and their differentiated progenies for preclinical and clinical applications. Therefore, there is a need to have standardized protocols for efficient generation of clinical-grade iPSC lines from easily accessible somatic cells in feeder-free, xenofree GMP grade culture conditions without genomic integration of the reprogramming factors. Here, we provide a detailed protocol for expansion of erythroid progenitor cells from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMNC) and generation of iPSC lines in feeder-free and xenofree culture conditions from these cells by using GMP grade reagents. With this optimized protocol, clinical-grade iPSC lines can be derived from erythroid progenitor cells expanded from peripheral blood, which is easy-to-access, minimally invasive, and can be obtained from any donors. It will have implications in developing a large number of iPSC lines from individual healthy donors, diseased patients, or donors with homozygous human leukocyte antigen (HLA) for "haplobanking."