Stem cell applications:Layout 1

academia and biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries envision the ‘stem cell’ as leading a metamorphosis of how cell-based assays are used to improve the level of success in the discovery of new ‘cellular’ and molecular drugs to serve unmet medical needs. Stem cells have utility as therapeutics as chronicled in the decades of successful hematopoietic stem cell transplants and the recent approval of mesenchymal stem cells for the treatment of graft vs host disease (GVHD). While cell therapies using multi-potent adult stem cell have shown success, their application to human disease is limited due to a restricted differentiation potential. The greatest therapeutic potential lies in the ‘pluripotent’ human embryonic stem cell (hESCs), which has the potential to create all cells of the body, and therefore be used to treat complex medical challenges such as spinal cord injury, the loss of pancreatic beta cells (diabetes), neurons (Alzheimer’s) and cardiac tissue due to infarct. The recent demonstration that human somatic cells such as skin fibroblast could be reprogrammed into ‘embryonic stem cell-like’ induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is likely to revolutionise how we exploit broad genetic backgrounds of pluripotent stem cells to create scalable iPSCs cells from patients to link human disease to drug discovery and possibly cellular therapy. Researchers in the growing field of regenerative medicine are exploring pathways to pharmacologically target stem cells in situ to augment their regenerative potential. As we await breakthroughs that will bring hESC or hiPSCs to the routine drug discovery screening laboratory, available multipotent adult stem cells are being used to create By Dr Mark A. Thiede