Stem Cells as a Research Tool

Most notably known for their potential in regenerative medicine, stem cells provide the opportunity for scientists make important discoveries in the world of disease and treatment research.

Drug Screening

Drug development for a variety of conditions could be improved with stem cell technology that helps doctors predict the safety and the effectiveness of possible treatments. In general, it can take years and a lot of money before a drug treatment will enter the market for human use. There has been an increased ability to induce stem cells into the desired type of differentiated tissue. This ability allows for specific diseases to be modeled or observed. It also allows for the observation of the effect of newly designed drugs on these diseases. In a perfect world, the results from animal testing would be less invasive and directly applicable to human trials, yet that is not always the case. Stem cells provide the opportunity for drug companies to screen a drug's toxic effects on actual human cells prior to actual clinical trials. (7)

For further indication of the importance of the use of stem cells in drug screening, watch Bruce Conklin, a professor and senior investigator for the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco ( here )discuss the screening of drugs for toxicity with human stem cells.

Stem cells provide a way to further understand diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Huntington's disease. The lack of understanding in the development of these diseases continues to put doctors in a difficult situation with patients, as they are incapable of giving the patient credible information on the disease. Induced pluripotent cells are adult stem cells that are dedifferentiated back to a pluripotent state. They are always genetically identical to the donor of that cell and if such a donor had a rare challenging disease, these IPCs would allow further research in how to detect or slow the diseases at an earlier stage and potentially prevent the condition.
For example, the IPSCs could be grown in a petri dish where they are transformed into the particular type of neuron that has been linked to Alzheimer's. (9) Hyun-Jung Kim and Chang Yun Jin observed this for neurodegenerative drug screening and toxicity. Since diseases like Parkinson's doesn't show neurodegeneration until late in adulthood, the IPSCs need time in order to show signs of disease. Although it is a long process to model the disease, the stem cells allow for certain drugs to be tested on a petri dish first, rather than a human. (19)

Infertility is a disease that affects millions of couples of reproductive age in the United States. Around 30% of couples have fertility issues, and much like the ability to track other diseases, embryonic stem cells provide an opportunity to observe the cells that become the sperm and eggs. It is thought that the earliest signs of infertility occur at the stage when embryonic stem cells develop into the germ line cells. Given that this occurs early on, stem cells have become a necessary tool in researching how one's potential infertility issues could be prevented. Thus, the ability to observe these changes on a plate may lead to potential treatment of infertility in years to come. (9)