LONDON (Reuters) - Ten international drug companies are to team
up with scientists from 11 European countries to create a bank
of stem cells for a project aimed at speeding up the development
of new medicines. StemBANCC, coordinated by Swiss drugmaker
Roche and managed by scientists at Oxford University, aims to
use so-called human-induced pluripotent stem cells - derived
from people with hard-to-treat conditions - as research tools.
Martin Graf from Roche, who is coordinating the project, said
the goal was to generate 1,500 induced pluripotent stem cell
lines derived from 500 patients that can then be used by
researchers around the world to study a range of diseases,
including diabetes and dementia. In recent years, researchers
have developed a way of reprogramming ordinary adult cells taken
from skin or blood, for example, to create stem cells that can
be used to generate any type of cell. These induced pluripotent
stem cells can offer a supply of different kinds of human cell
such as cardiomyocytes, or hea