Enhanced Reprogramming Efficiency and Kinetics of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Derived from Human Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

The generation of disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) holds a great promise for understanding disease mechanisms and for drug screening. Recently, patient-derived iPSCs, containing identical genetic anomalies of the patient, have offered a breakthrough approach to studying Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a fatal disease caused by the mutation in the dystrophin gene. However, development of scalable and high fidelity DMD-iPSCs is hampered by low reprogramming efficiency, the addition of expensive growth factors and slow kinetics of disease-specific fibroblasts. Here, we show an efficient generation of DMD-iPSCs on bFGF secreting human foreskin fibroblast feeders (I-HFF) by employing single polycistronic lentiviral vector for delivering of transcription factors to DMD patient-specific fibroblast cells. Using this method, DMD-iPSCs generated on I-HFF feeders displayed pluripotent characteristics and disease genotype with improved reprogramming efficiency and kinetics over to mouse feeders. Moreover, we were able to maintain disease-specific iPSCs without additional supplementation of bFGF on I-HFF feeders. Our findings offer improvements in the generation of DMD-iPSCs and will facilitate in understanding of pathological mechanisms and screening of safer drugs for clinical intervention.