Scientific direction and leadership

Human pluripotent stem cells today come from two sources, one physiological, “ES” cells, derived from the embryo, and the other experimental, “iPS” cells induced to pluripotency by genetic reprogramming of somatic cells. These cells have two major properties, unlimited self-renewal which allows to produce in the laboratory any desired number of cells at the undifferentiated stage, and pluripotency which gives access, from these undifferentiated cells, to all cell types of the human organism. The mastery of these two cardinal properties has been the main focus of the work carried out by hundreds of research teams worldwide during the ten years following the emergence of human ES cells in 1998. The exploitation of these mastered properties for the treatment of genetic diseases is the objective of I-Stem.

The therapeutic strategies developed by the I-Stem teams are disruptive strategies compared to everything that has been done until now. However, they are integrated in two major therapeutic research fields explored, with other strategies, by many other academic and industrial players, that of cell therapy and that of drug discovery.