How can pluripotent stem cells speed drug screening?
Stem cells are expected to dramatically improve the ability of drug companies to screen for side effects of new drugs much earlier in the development process, a benefit that would significantly lower the costs and speed the timeframe of developing a new drug. Currently, all drugs go through extensive animal trials before they are ever given to people. However, animals aren’t humans. Drugs that appear perfectly safe in animals often have dramatic side effects in people. The ideal solution to the problem of drug side effects would be to test the drugs on human cells before the drugs enter human clinical trials. The most common drug side effects are on the liver, kidney, and heart. For that reason, those are the tissues people are trying to create from pluripotent stem cells to use for screening drug toxicity. The idea behind toxicity screening using human stem cells would be that drug companies would have banks of stem cells from embryos and people with a wide variety of genetic backgrou
