SCItations

Induced pluripotent stem cells. The name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and it certainly doesn't conjure images of mice, fruit flies, monkeys, or any of the other classic model organisms used for basic biomedical research. These so called "model organisms" are just that; animals that help scientists model the way that the most promising human therapeutics in the collective pipeline will behave in humans. And now induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, are becoming an increasingly popular tool used for developing and testing novel drugs way before we expose any real human patients to them. The upside to using model organisms is pretty obvious -- we minimize exposure of humans to potentially unsafe molecules. The downsides are many, but one big one is that sometimes potential new drug molecules look really promising when they are given to a mouse with a human-like disease, but then that same molecule does nothing (or worse, is toxic!) when it goes into human clin...