By Dr. Karen Ring for CIRM/Big3Bio:
CIRM kicked off the 2016 International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) Conference in San Francisco with a public stem cell event yesterday that brought scientists, patients, patient advocates and members of the general public together to discuss the many ways stem cells are being used in the clinic to develop treatments for patients with unmet medical needs.
Bruce Conklin, Gladstone Institutes & UCSF
Bruce Conklin, an Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and UCSF Professor, moderated the panel of four scientists and three patient advocates. He immediately captured the audience’s attention by showing a stunning video of human heart cells, beating in synchrony in a petri dish. Conklin explained that scientists now have the skills and technology to generate human stem cell models of cardiomyopathy (heart disease) and many other diseases in a dish.
Conklin went on to highlight four main ways that stem cells are contributing to human therapy. First is using stem cells to model diseases whose causes are still largely unknown (like with Parkinson’s disease). Second, genome editing of stem cells is a new technology that has the potential to offer cures to patients with genetic disorders like sickle cell anemia. Third, stem cells are known to secrete healing factors, and transplanting them into humans could be beneficial. Lastly, stem cells can be engineered to attack cancer cells and overcome cancer’s normal way of evading the immune system.
Before introducing the other panelists, Conklin made the final point that stem cell models are powerful because scientists can use them to screen and develop new drugs for diseases that have no treatments or cures. His lab is already working on identifying new drugs for heart disease using human induced pluripotent stem cells derived from patients with cardiomyopathy.