Embryonic Stem Cells

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) hold great promise to provide important new therapeutic approaches in treating age-associated diseases and other medical conditions due to their unique capacity for self-renewal, their pluripotency and their ability to differentiate into a broad variety of cell types. To date, numerous hESC lines have been developed and characterised. We discuss here how hESC lines are derived, their molecular and cellular properties, and how their ability to differentiate into all three embryonic germ layers is determined. We highlight some of the challenges that must be overcome to obtain and evaluate therapeutic populations from hESCs and the strategies that are being developed to enable the use of hESC-derived cell populations in clinical applications. We conclude with a discussion of clinical trials that are beginning to provide evidence for the therapeutic potential of tissue-specific differentiated populations derived from human embryonic stem cells.