Market Challenges

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) can be used as an unlimited source of retinal cells for the treatment of retinal degenerative diseases. Moreover, different field of application establishes potential roles for hiPSCs in modeling diseases and drug discovery.
Although much progress has been made in the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells towards different retinal lineages, classical techniques do not enable the production of a huge number of retinal cells from hiPSCs. This requires the development of easy and standardized protocols to obtain billion cells.

Innovative solution

To address these requirements, Dr. Sacha Reichman’s group in the team of Dr. Olivier Goureau at the Vision Institute, developed new culture media allowing simple and effective amplification and differentiation of hiPSC-derived retinal progenitor cells (hiRPCs).
Banked at low passages, expended hiRPCs keep their multipotency characteristics and are able to generate the main retinal cell types as retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), photoreceptor precursor cells (PRPs), amacrines cells and horizontal cells. Those differentiated cells are obtained in a huge quantity (billion of cells). hiRPC-derived cells can even be applied for therapeutic purposes because the same retinal phenotype are obtained with different hiPSC clones and the results are reproducible.

Development status

• The ability of hiRPCs to differentiate in PRPs and RGCs by spontaneous differentiation was tested. The results obtained by immunostaining show that the hiRPCs are able to differentiate in the PRPs and RGCs after several passages.
• The passage number was determined by performing a series of consecutive passages each week. The results show that the cells cultured and passed are still able to multiply
• The multipotent phenotype of hiRPCs was confirmed by a RT-qPCR analysis. The results show that hiRPCs at passage 2 (hiRPCp2) to hiRPCp4 maintain the expression of RPC-specific genes stable and comparable to native RPCs.