Advancing stem cell therapy from bench to bedside: lessons from drug therapies

The inadequacy of existing therapeutic tools together with the paucity of organ donors have always led medical researchers to innovate the current treatment methods or to discover new ways to cure disease. Emergence of cell-based therapies has provided a new framework through which it has given the human world a new hope. Though relatively a new concept, the pace of advancement clearly reveals the significant role that stem cells will ultimately play in the near future. However, there are numerous uncertainties that are prevailing against the present setting of clinical trials related to stem cells: like the best route of cell administration, appropriate dosage, duration and several other applications. A better knowledge of these factors can substantially improve the effectiveness of disease cure or organ repair using this latest therapeutic tool. From a certain perspective, it could be argued that by considering certain proven clinical concepts and experience from synthetic drug system, we could improve the overall efficacy of cell-based therapies. In the past, studies on synthetic drug therapies and their clinical trials have shown that all the aforementioned factors have critical ascendancy over its therapeutic outcomes. Therefore, based on the knowledge gained from synthetic drug delivery systems, we hypothesize that by employing many of the clinical approaches from synthetic drug therapies to this new regenerative therapeutic tool, the efficacy of stem cell-based therapies can also be improved.