You are a unique snowflake. Nobody on earth has the same DNA or biochemistry as you. Clinical medicine is blind to these differences. When someone has high cholesterol, they are prescribed Lipitor or another similar drug. Although the drugs save lives, they are absolutely not customized for an individual’s personal body type, body chemistry or predisposition genetic predisposition for particular conditions. A growing field, called personalized medicine, attempts to treat you on an individualized basis by acknowledging these differences.
Stem Cells are the key to identifying particular populations and testing new drug compounds in order to get to true personalized medicine. Stem Cells are used to grow or regenerate almost any kind of tissue in the body – from muscles to eyes to lungs. In the cholesterol example, identifying persons with hypertension, high cholesterol from families of Eastern European decent might be a particular population which may require a different drug than say people with the same high cholesterol, a history or low blood pressure and whose descendants were from the Asian sub-continent. By identifying particular discrete populations, we can create drugs that treat people best.
Where does this eventually lead us: Well, someday soon you will deposit your cells in a bank which will securely hold them for you until you need them. Let’s say you end up needing a new liver: You’d go to the bank and withdraw some of your cells. A specialist would then make a cocktail of drugs, cells and machines that would grow you a brand new liver. However, before any of this can become a reality, researchers need to understand how drug compounds affect stem cells.
Drug discovery is a lot like gold mining: you shovel through thousands of tons of dirt to find tiny gold nuggets. At the start of the Gold Rush, miners toiled endlessly with pick-axes and gold pans. Eventually, the more innovative sort graduated to hydraulic jets, doing the job of hundreds of miners at once. StemDiscTM is the hydraulic jet of regenerative stem cell research, allowing 96,000 Embryoid Bodies to be screened in one experiment.
StemDisc™ can grow a huge number of your stem cells outside of the body. Like a try-before-you-buy deal, drug screening allows a drug to be tested on your cells before being put into your body. Thousands of individual drug compounds can be tested against thousands of cells, where the reaction can be studied. Any drug that can complete this screening battery is nearly guaranteed to work well with your unique chemistry.
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