Abstract
Human lymphoblast cells were used to generate integration-free induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) employing episomal-based plasmids expressing OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, LIN28, c-MYC and L-MYC. The derived iPSCs were defined as pluripotent based on (i) expression of pluripotency-associated markers, (ii) embryoid body-based differentiation into cell types representative of the three germ layers and (iii) the similarity between the transcriptomes of the iPSC line and the human embryonic stem cell line H1 with a Pearson correlation of 0.95.