The advent of reprogramming provides the opportunity to transform the drug development process and to develop personalized therapies on the basis of disease- and patient-specific cellular
in-vitro models. Based on its unique platform development (result of preceding projects StemCellFactory I and StemCellFactory II) the
StemCellFcatory III project aims at the generation of innovative iPS cells for drug development and drug efficacy testing. To that end, automated solutions for the reprogramming
of patient blood samples (PBMCs) and CRISPR/Cas-based (RNPs) genome editing will be developed and integrated into the existing StemCellFactory system. To tackle the inadequately
choosing and dosing of existing medications for, in particular, neuropsychiatric disorders stratified iPS cell lines will be used to develop personalized in vitro models for drug efficacy
testing. Therefore, scalable and standardized methods for the generation of 3D neuronal aggregates (organoids) will be established to explore the use of iPS cell-derived neuronal
tissue in metabolic assay development.
