by Olivia Harvey
ABSTRACT
Billed for over a decade now as potentially providing revolutionary new treatment protocols in biomedicine, the development of clinical therapies from human embryonic stem (hES) cells has faced significant barriers. The recent discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) in 2006 however is widely seen to go part-way towards overcoming at least some of these barriers. But to what extent does the use of iPS cells instead of hES cells increase the potential for the prospective development of clinical products from pluripotent stem cells? In particular, what would a commercial model for iPS cell based therapies look like?