Highlights d Reprogramming of patient somatic cells to induced hTSCs with OSKM d Conversion of naive and extended hPSCs to hTSCs d Comparison of models of the human trophoblast lineage d h(i/c)TSCs are akin to day 8 trophoblasts of the human embryo

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have considerably impacted human developmental biology and regenerative medicine, notably because they circumvent the use of cells of embryonic origin and offer the potential to generate patient-specific pluripotent stem cells. However, conventional reprogramming protocols produce developmentally advanced, or primed, human iPSCs (hiPSCs), restricting their use to post-implantation human development modeling. Hence, there is a need for hiPSCs resembling preimplantation naive epiblast. Here, we develop a method to generate naive hiPSCs directly from somatic cells, using OKMS overexpression and specific culture conditions, further enabling parallel generation of their isogenic primed counterparts. We benchmark naive hiPSCs against human preimplantation epiblast and reveal remarkable concordance in their transcriptome, dependency on mitochondrial respiration and X-chromosome status. Collectively, our results are essential for the understanding of pluripotency regulation throughout preimplantation development and generate new opportunities for disease modeling and regenerative medicine.

CD8+ Tregs have been long described and significant progresses have been made about their phenotype, their functional mechanisms, and their suppressive ability compared to conventional CD4+ Tregs. They are now at the dawn of their clinical use. In this review, we will summarize their phenotypic characteristics, their mechanisms of action, the similarities, differences and synergies between CD8+ and CD4+ Tregs, and we will discuss the biology, development and induction of CD8+ Tregs, their manufacturing for clinical use, considering open questions/uncertainties and future technically accessible improvements notably through genetic modifications.

Autoimmune regulator (AIRE) deficiency in humans induces a life-threatening generalized autoimmune disease called autoimmune polyendocrinopathy-candidiasis-ectodermal dystrophy (APECED), and no curative treatments are available. Several models of AIRE-deficient mice have been generated, and although they have been useful in understanding the role of AIRE in central tolerance, they do not reproduce accurately the APECED symptoms, and thus there is still a need for an animal model displaying APECED-like disease. We assessed, in this study, the potential of the rat as an accurate model for APECED. In this study, we demonstrate that in rat, AIRE is expressed by MHC class II (MCH-II) and MHC-II medullary thymic epithelial cells in thymus and by CD4 conventional dendritic cells in periphery. To our knowledge, we generated the first AIRE-deficient rat model using zinc-finger nucleases and demonstrated that they display several of the key symptoms of APECED disease, including alopecia, skin depigmentation, and nail dystrophy, independently of the genetic background. We observed severe autoimmune lesions in a large spectrum of organs, in particular in the pancreas, and identified several autoantibodies in organs and cytokines such as type I IFNs and IL-17 at levels similar to APECED. Finally, we demonstrated a biased Ab response to IgG1, IgM, and IgA isotypes. Altogether, our data demonstrate that AIRE-deficient rat is a relevant APECED animal model, opening new opportunity to test curative therapeutic treatments.