From bench to bedside: iPS cells at the frontier of drug discovery

Developing new medicines is often a long and uncertain endeavour. The ‘valley of death’ in drug discovery is recognised as the disparity between preclinical findings and clinical translation, which results in nearly 96% of failed drug candidates (Akhtar, 2015). This crisis is mainly due to the inaccuracy of animal models in recapitulating human disease biology, which calls for a more relevant preclinical model that can predict clinical outcomes (Van Der Worp et al., 2010; Waring et al., 2015). Developing human-based in vitro assays is therefore crucial for preventing the use of faulty substances in clinical trials, which poses unnecessary risks for patients, as well as avoiding wasting time and resources, given the rising cost of drug development. By differentiating iPS cells into key cell types in drug safety screening, such as cardiomyocytes or hepatocytes, as well as into inaccessible cell types such as neurons, the goal is to build a robust triage system for testing various compounds from our diverse medicinal plants.