Stem Cells: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Satish M. Totey

Aureostem Research Pvt Ltd., Sobha Jasmine, Green Glen Layout, Bellandur, Bengaluru-560103 (INDIA)

PAGE NO: 67-79

ABSTRACT – DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.47204/EBR.1.1.2021.67-79

In the recent years there has been a keen interest in stem cell research primarily due to their enormous potential and promises that they offer to the patients as a cell therapy with the hope to treat and cure several incurable and debilitating diseases that have limited or no treatment options. These innovative and specialized therapies are now complementing existing available treatments such as small molecules, biologicals and medical devices and thereby becoming a fourth pillar of health industry.
Stem cells is continued to be a subject of considerable excitement and debate for the last two decades. Significant progress has been made in understanding their mechanisms and unravelling their therapeutic potential. Currently, there are over 5000 registered clinical trials involving stem cells globally for various diseases and few stem cell products are already available in the market including India. However, stem cells therapies are complex and this complexity poses many challenges. Among them are poor reproducibility, poor therapeutic outcome, poor post injection survivability and migration to the site of injury, scaling up of production, risk of cancer and lack of understanding of underlying mechanism needed for clinical advances.
Stem cell research has generated lot of hype. Although, stem cell has shown some promising results but hype generated for the past two decades, has not shown so far convincing clinical outcome. Unfortunately, there are several unscrupulous clinics globally that are offering unregulated risky direct-to-consumer stem cell therapy without any proven clinical data and regulatory approvals.
Here we discuss potential new scientific approach about the stem cells in the light of current biological understanding in clinical uses and drug discovery, potential challenges that are hindering the development of stem cell therapies and strategies to circumvent these challenges in order to accelerate the development of therapies and drug discovery.