Access

Opinion and Comment

Nature Biotechnology 26, 739–740 (1 July 2008) | doi:10.1038/nbt0708-739

HLA-haplotype banking and iPS cells

Norio Nakatsuji , Fumiaki Nakajima & Katsushi Tokunaga

To the editor: The production of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines from human somatic cells, such as skin fibroblasts, recently reported in your January issue and elsewhere, opens the exciting new possibility of producing personalized pluripotent stem cell lines from individual patients without using human oocytes or embryos. In addition to circumventing ethical problems associated with human embryonic stem (ES) cells, this new approach could also address immunological rejection associated with cell therapies because iPS cell lines could be created with human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-haplotypes matching those of individual patients.