Embryonic stem cells: meeting the needs for cell therapy

Cell therapy in diverse organs has bloomed for degenerative diseases over the past decade, following a previous period of development in which haematopoietic stem cells grafts in oncology were its most prominent clinical application. One main limitation that has, however, been encountered on the path for transforming pioneering successes into real therapeutics, that would be applicable to a clinically relevant number of patients, is the difficulty in accessing "therapeutic" cells, such as foetal neurons in neurodegenerative diseases, adult pancreatic beta cells in diabetes or else myoblasts in heart failure and myopathy. The future of cell therapy definitely belongs to cell banks, from which physicians would simply have to draw according to their needs. However, besides haematopoietic stem cells, for which such infrastructures begin to exist for clinical purposes (in particular from cord blood), cell banks are still up to now essentially a scientific concept. This review focuses on the possibility for human ES cells to meet both the requirements of cell banking and the needs for substitutive cell therapy.