Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Global pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) also use
iPSCs in drug development processes for testing, screening and
toxicity models (GSK, 2011). From the point of view of drug
development, iPSCs are designed to stand in for the experimental
subject of clinical trials. Drug candidates are added to the cell culture
and the resulting biochemical interactions and cell development are
meant to show how the drug candidate affects human biology. The
same concerns about the degree to which a collection of cells
in vitro
can possibly represent a whole human being are also raised in drug
development. Yet the key advantages here are that such a trial-by-proxy
process would add another level of safety to drug development. The
use of iPSCs as an additional tool in drug development has meant
that pharmaceutical companies are increasingly interested in the
development of this area of research.
6.2
Imagined scenarios
Although iPSC technology is still a long way off any therapeutic
applications, there are some intriguing possibilities for the commercial
outcomes of iPSC products once the technical and practical difficulties
are resolved. Notwithstanding the current technical hitches with immune
reactions, therapeutic applications involving the derivation of patient-
specific stem cells could potentially be relatively low cost, easy to deliver
to patients and highly lucrative as patients seek out iPSC therapies.
There are a number of scenarios that might emerge for the commercial
application of therapeutic iPSC products, yet it is too soon to tell exactly
which scenarios will prove to be most lucrative in the long term.
Theoretically, in the case of iPSCs, the market potential is only
limited by the capacity of patient demand and individual and
health-system capacity to pay for available treatments. While much
of the disease-in-a-dish modelling has focused on rare genetic
diseases so far, much of the incentive for any research development
is aimed at developing treatments for illnesses that affect the wealthy
populations of the industrialized world in the highest numbers. As
with adult and embryonic stem cell research, diabetes and heart
disease are two such candidates for iPSC-based treatment modalities.
