特別演講1:

程 序 表

P-2
Stem Cell-based Personalized Therapy for Precision Health in the 21st Century.
Professor Sean M. Wu, M.D., Ph.D. FACC
Endowed Faculty Scholar of CHRI,
Dept. of Medicine and Cardiovascular Institute,
Stanford University School of Medicine, USA

  The development of new treatments against human diseases has become increasingly challenging and costly. Furthermore, many of the existing treatments work only in very small fractions of the patients with the disease despite their demonstrated benefit in clinical trials. To addresses these issues, the US President Obama recently announced a bold and ambitious initiative to promote precision medicine – a term generally believed to mean giving the right medicine to the right patient at the right time. While this effort is conceptually appealing, it has been difficult to put into specific action. We and others have been developing innovative strategies to diagnose and treat patients with cardiovascular diseases using stem cells. Based on the technology of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) that was discovered by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006 and subsequently validated world-wide, we have shown that iPSCs can be used to effectively model human cardiovascular diseases and as a platform to develop new drugs and assess drug efficacy on an individual patient basis. In this lecture, I will discuss ways in which human iPSC may be used to help reduced the cost of drug development and identify the highest yield patient population for clinical trial. Furthermore, cardiotoxicity is the number one reason for withdrawl of approved drugs from market. I will illustrate ways in which human cardiac muscle cells derived from iPSC can be used to screen and identify drug candidates that carry potentially lethal cardiotoxicity. We believe that the use of human iPSC technology to develop effective tools and assays for understanding disease mechanism and discover new drug entities will help reduce the overall cost of drug development and accomplish the noble goals of preventing and treating patients with diseases in the most precise way possible.