Drug discovery involves high cost and uncertain outcomes. Only a few companies can take the risk of investing enormous amounts of money into research and testing, only to see undesirable side effects emerge during the final human clinical trials. In many cases, companies are spending millions of dollars to fail during clinical testing.
Thankfully, some new medicines are now being tested for safety on specialized cells developed from human pluripotent cell lines. Cell types which are increasingly being used within drug discovery applications include heart (cardiomyocytes) and liver cells (hepatocytes), which are the organs where 80% of drug failures occur. [Read more…]
