Novel Stem Cell-Based Drug Discovery Platforms for Cardiovascular Disease

The complexity and diversity of many human diseases pose significant hurdles to the development of novel therapeutics. New scientific and technological advances, such as pharmacogenetics, provide valuable frameworks for understanding genetic predisposition to disease and tools for diagnosis and drug development. However, another framework is emerging based on recent scientific advances, one we suggest to call pharmacoempirics. Pharmacoempirics takes advantage of merging two nascent fields: first, the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells, which are differentiated into mature cell types and represent patient-specific genetic backgrounds, and, second, bioengineering advances allowing sophisticated re-creation of human pathophysiology in laboratory settings. The combination of these two innovative technologies should allow new experimentation on disease biology and drug discovery, efficacy, and toxicology unencumbered by hypothesis generation and testing. In this review, we discuss the challenges and promises of this exciting new type of discovery platform and outline its implementation for cardiovascular drug discovery.