Have you seen differences in differentiation potential between ES and iPS cells? What about reproducibility?

Answer

The STEMdiff™ Pancreatic Progenitor Kit was optimized with reproducibility in mind. We designed both the medium formulation as well as the protocol to maximize the efficiency of differentiation across multiple human embryonic stem (ES) and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines (see Figure 2 here for the supporting data). At STEMCELL Technologies, we routinely use the Wisconsin H1 (WA1) and H9 (WA9) human ES cell lines during the development of our STEMdiff™ products. In addition, we have acquired or generated many iPS cell lines, derived from a variety of somatic cell types. Results generated using these cell lines indicate that the user of this kit can expect to see on average, greater than 65% of cells co-expressing PDX-1 and NKX6.1 at the end of Stage 4. Some experiments have generated greater than 90% pure populations of pancreatic progenitors. We do not see a significant difference in the efficiency of differentiation between human ES and iPS cell lines. Within a given experiment, well-to-well variability is also quite low, generally less than 5%.