RIKEN's Takahashi speaks at press conference Prospects for iPS Clinical Research

Masayo Takahashi, November 26, 2014 : Masayo Takahashi Project Leader of Laboratory for Retinal Regeneration Center for Developmental Biology, RIKEN speaks at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan on November 26, 2014 in Tokyo, Japan. The leader of the First Ever In-human Clinical Study iPS Cells spoke about the medical future applications of the iPS (induced pluripotent stems) cells. Her team implanted as a first time into the eye of an elderly patient suffering from macular degeneration last September. Takahashi's team and Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka, who discovered how to create iPS figured out how to turn iPS cells into retinal pigment epithelial cells. In the theory the iPS cells can develop into any of the cell types within a body, like other types of cells. (Photo by Rodrigo Reyes Marin/AFLO)