Emeritus Director
Professor Dr. Hans R. Schöler
Pluripotent cells are extremely remarkable because they can be used to derive all the cells in the mammalian body. In 2003, we achieved a breakthrough: we were able to prove that egg cells can be derived from pluripotent cells even in a culture dish. This opened up a new field of research in reproductive biology.
But until a few years ago, everything seemed clear: with the birth of a human being, the organism reached a point of no return. A cell in the body, whether it's a skin cell, a hair cell, a fat cell or a blood cell, cannot ever become something other than what it is. However, this dogma had been toppled from its pedestal. Studies that led to Shinya Yamanaka's Nobel Prize showed that mature body cells can be transformed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), which are similar to embryonic stem cells. Like the latter, the reprogrammed cells possess the fascinating ability known as pluripotency. They are able to transform themselves into more than 200 types of body cells. These cells hold great promise, as they may enable the treatment of incurable diseases such as Parkinson's and diabetes using healthy replacement cells from the patient themselves.
As numerous publications have shown, my former department has made significant progress in answering how pluripotency develops both in vivo during embryogenesis and in vitro in the dish and understanding the mechanisms that drive this process. In the years leading up to my retirement, some members became increasingly involved in using human pluripotent stem cells to study molecular processes during reprogramming and to effectively model human diseases, specifically neurodegenerative diseases, as they may not be fully recapitulated in animal models. In order to bridge the insurmountable gap between current in vitro and in vivo research on human tissue, we engineered 3D models of in vivo-like human brain tissue. Such approaches are facilitated by a reprogramming factor that we have constructed called super-Sox. Super-Sox has an increased ability to work alongside another transcription factor, Oct4. This dramatically enhances the reprogramming process. Using Super-Sox, we have produced high-quality iPS cells from humans and other species, such as mice, crab-eating monkeys, cattle and pigs, with high efficiency. Super-Sox has revealed the key role of the Sox2/Oct4 dimer in the developmental potential of pluripotent stem cells, answering a question that has puzzled scientists ever since Sir Martin Evans first isolated mouse embryonic stem cells in 1981. Super-Sox opens up new possibilities for cell replacement therapies and growing organs for transplantation, as well as opening up avenues for more unexpected applications, such as conserving endangered species.
