Induced pluripotent stem cells from human placental chorion for perinatal tissue engineering applications

The reliable derivation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from a noninvasive autologous source at birth would facilitate the study of patient-specific in vitro modeling of congenital diseases and would enhance ongoing efforts aimed at developing novel cell-based treatments for a wide array of fetal and pediatric disorders. Accordingly, we have successfully generated iPSCs from human fetal chorionic somatic cells extracted from term pregnancies by ectopic expression of OCT4, SOX2, KLF4, and cMYC. The isolated parental somatic cells exhibited an immunophenotypic profile consistent with that of chorionic mesenchymal stromal cells (CMSCs). CMSC-iPSCs maintained pluripotency in feeder-free systems for more than 15 passages based on morphology, immunocytochemistry, and gene expression studies and were capable of embryoid body formation with spontaneous trilineage differentiation. CMSC-iPSCs could be selectively differentiated in vitro into various germ layer derivatives, including neural stem cells, beating cardiomyocytes, and definitive endoderm. This study demonstrates the feasibility of term placental chorion as a novel noninvasive alternative to dermal fibroblasts and cord blood for human perinatal iPSC derivation and may provide additional insights regarding the reprogramming capabilities of extra-embryonic tissues as they relate to developmental ontogeny and perinatal tissue engineering applications.