Disease modeling with patient-specific iPS cells
Whether in mice or macaques, disease modeling traditionally has been a tedious and expensive affair, not to mention unreliable, as mutations that are crippling in humans could have negligible impacts in animals, and vice versa. As drug development often requires preclinical animal studies, that disconnect has had real implications for the pharmaceuticals industry, both in money and missed opportunities. Today, researchers increasingly are migrating their models from the mouse house to the culture room. Armed with induced pluripotent stem cells made from patient cells, these investigators are probing everything from basic biology and disease etiology to drug discovery and cell therapeutics… Read more at Science. (PDF)
Biotechnically Speaking 