Banking of Pluripotent Stem Cells: Issues and Opportunities from the NIH Perspective

Over the past 15 years, pluripotent stem (PS) cells have changed the face of biomedical research and provided fresh hope for regenerative medicine-based therapies. Successful implementation of PS cell-based therapy will rely on developing an organized plan for identifying appropriate biospecimen donors, obtaining appropriate consent, collecting necessary patient history data, and developing an organized system for storage and delivery of tissue samples and cell lines. This is particularly important as the number of PS cells being generated is large and ever-growing, and the potential for their use in drug discovery and therapy depends on organized, comprehensive systems for generating systematically well-characterized cell lines and cell line panels from which differentiated cells can be generated. In this chapter, we outline the efforts made by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a human embryonic stem (hES) cell registry and PS cell banks, efforts we believe will be an integral part of the future of PSC therapy.