Banking on iPSCs

About four years ago, Jay Tischfield, the director of RUDCR Infinite Biologics, a long-standing biorepository at Rutgers University, found himself sitting on a gold mine. RUDCR had recently gotten into the business of banking induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines as part of an initiative through the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). This was still early days in iPSC derivation, a few years after the pioneers of the field had figured out how to turn skin cells into pluripotent cells.

But not long into this new endeavor, “something important happened in the field,” Tischfield recalled. Researchers reported for the first time that they could induce pluripotency from blood cells. It just so happened that RUDCR was in possession of a massive collection of blood cell lines, each with a heap of information on the donor. “There we were, standing on what is perhaps one of the world’s, if not the world’s, largest collection of genetically defined . . . lymphocytes from literally almost a half a million subjects,” he said.

All of these non-transformed small lymphocytes...