Endocrine Abstracts

Neurons in the hypothalamus play central roles in physiology and behavior, and their loss or dysfunction cause common human diseases such as obesity and the sleep disorder narcolepsy. Efforts to study these diseases have been hindered by the inaccessibility of human hypothalamic neurons. I developed a robust method to generate hypothalamic neurons from human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells. These stem cell-derived hypothalamic neurons include the AGRP and POMC neu...

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The last couple of years have seen an advance in generating human β-cells from pluripotent stem cells. It is now clear that cells of greatly increased maturity can be obtained from robust protocols. In addition to improving the prospects of cell replacement therapy, these developments allied to greater understanding of how human β-cells are first generated in the body are allowing development of more complex model systems. These model systems are likely to be importa...