Fig. 3.

Current cellular reprogramming technologies and future biomedical applications. Cell fate changes can be induced to generate human cells for (1) in vitro disease modeling and (2) drug discovery as well as for potential (3) personalized drug screens in precision medicine and (4) regenerative applications in the near future. Donor cells such as fibroblasts can be directly reprogrammed to many cell types of biomedical interest, while this process usually is very fast it often only generates a limited amount of cells. Alternatively, donor cells can first be reprogrammed to induced pluripotency and subsequently directed to the intended fate, in general this procedure is more time consuming but in theory generates unlimited amounts of cells for biomedical applications