Great potential of N/TERT cells in skin research Publication in Scientific Reports

20 September 2017

In a publication in Scientific Reports, researchers from the Experimental Dermatology Laboratory, themes Inflammatory diseases and Infectious diseases and global health, and the department of Human Genetics, have shown the great potential of two immortalized human keratinocyte cell lines (N/TERT1 and N/TERT2G) for studies on epidermal biology, inflammatory skin disease pathogenesis and therapeutics.

The paper, first authored by Jos Smits, PhD candidate (photo), concludes that the N/TERT keratinocyte cell lines can be considered as excellent and versatile alternatives for human primary keratinocytes and the widely used, but inferior, HaCaT cell line. The authors were able to mimick the phenotype of inflammatory skin diseases, psoriasis and atopic dermatitis, in the 3D skin cultures generated from N/TERT keratinocytes and could subsequently rescue the phenotype by the addition of clinically relevant therapeutics. The N/TERT keratinocytes are particularly interesting for use in modern genome editing techniques, such as CRISPR-Cas9. This is a great advantage of these cells over human primary keratinocytes and other keratinocyte cell lines. The paper by Smits et al. provides a mini-review of all literature using the N/TERT1 and N/TERT2G keratinocyte cell lines and aims to supply a landmark paper on the implementation of both N/TERT cell lines as an alternative cell source for primary keratinocytes and HaCaT cells in the fields of cell biology, tissue engineering, dermatology, and toxicology. Publication: Immortalized N/TERT keratinocytes as an alternative cell source in 3D human epidermal models.

Publication in Scientific Reports. 

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