How to quickly generate a large quantity of personalized nerve cells

A team under the direction of Stanford cell physiologist and neuroscientist Tom Sudhof, PhD, has shown that in human ESCs or iPSCs, just boosting the level of a single transcription factor results in an abundant and quite pure population of nerve cells within as little as two weeks.

And unlike previous methods, this one seems to generate nerve cells of equally high functional quality regardless of which “starter” cell line was used to get the process underway.

Clearly, if you’re doing regenerative medicine for a stroke or brain-trauma victim etc., you’re going to need a lot of nerve cells, and time is of the essence. So the new method represents a major forward step toward the realization of the dream of personalized regenerative medicine.

http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2013/06/12/youve-got-a-lot-of-nerve-industrial-scale-procedure-for-generating-plenty-of-personalized-nerve-cells/