Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Stem Cells. Apr 26, 2016; 8(4): 158-169
Published online Apr 26, 2016. doi: 10.4252/wjsc.v8.i4.158
Mucosal-associated invariant T cells from induced pluripotent stem cells: A novel approach for modeling human diseases
Chie Sugimoto, Hiroyoshi Fujita, Hiroshi Wakao
Chie Sugimoto, Hiroyoshi Fujita, Hiroshi Wakao, Department of Hygiene and Cellular Preventive Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-8638, Japan
Author contributions: All authors contributed to interpreting the collected data and writing the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interests for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Hiroshi Wakao, PhD, Department of Hygiene and Cellular Preventive Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Hokkaido University, N15W7 Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-8638, Japan. hwakao@med.hokudai.ac.jp
Telephone: +81-11-7065066 Fax: +81-11-7067819
Received: June 17, 2015
Peer-review started: June 20, 2015
First decision: August 14, 2015
Revised: September 17, 2015
Accepted: February 14, 2016
Article in press: February 16, 2016
Published online: April 26, 2016
Processing time: 300 Days and 19.3 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells, a novel innate-like T cell subset abundant in humans, play a pivotal role in immune-dysregulated diseases. However, MAIT cells are quite rare in laboratory mice and show poor proliferation in vitro. This makes it difficult to delineate their physiological functions in health and disease. Therefore, we developed a method to generate human MAIT cells from induced pluripotent stem cells [redifferentiation of MAIT (reMAIT) cells]. Given that reMAIT cells harbor characteristics quasi-identical to those found in MAIT cells from human peripheral blood, they will be useful to model human diseases in animals.