Stem Cells That Save Big Pharma a Bundle - BusinessWeek: It's a frustrating and expensive pitfall for pharmaceutical companies: discovering late in the game that a promising new drug has side effects in humans that never surfaced in the laboratory or during earlier trials in animals. That kind of setback sends scientists back to the lab—or even prompts a company to shut down a multimillion-dollar drug development program. Researchers hope they can use human tissue created from stem cells to help identify potentially dangerous side-effects from drugs under development before human trials.
The stem cells being employed by drugmakers don't come from embryos, thereby avoiding an ethical and political controversy that's dogged the technology. Instead they were created using a method that allows scientists to transform ordinary skin cells into another type of stem cell (known as induced pluripotent stem, or IPS, cells) as versatile as embryonic cells.
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