Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Biological Previews
Looking for a way to see if a drug might give you side effects--without having to deal with the whole pesky process of experiencing those effects? Science writer David Ewing Duncan highlights an experimental technology from Cell Dynamics International involving reverse engineering cells from the body, such as blood cells, into pluripotent stem cells, and then engineering them back into organ cells in order to test out how different stimuli and medications might impact one's cells.
Duncan, who is the first patient in the world to have the technology used for personal testing, describes the process as follows:
CDI has offered to run an experiment on me in the coming weeks involving their process. They propose to draw cells from my blood, reverse them back to IPS cells, and then create heart cells that are a perfect genetic match to me. They will then test these heart cells by applying various drugs that show some cardio-toxic effects, to see how sensitive to them I am.
These drugs might include statin drugs used to lower cholesterol--to see if they show evidence of a rare side effect for these medications. I carry a genetic marker that makes me high risk to myopathy--a weakening of muscle tissue--a side effect that impacts about two percent of patients who take statins.
CDI scientists told me that they don't know how these experiments will come out, and the company does not plan to offer this service publicly anytime soon. But one day this sort of test could become a powerful tool--combining genetic profiling and cell-toxicity screening using IPS cells--to determine adverse reactions to drugs in genetically high-risk individuals before they ever take a given drug.
As Duncan notes elsewhere, the application here probably won't be direct-to-consumer so much as for researchers, who can order up cell samples from individuals with specific genetic markers to test how different drugs would likely affect subsets of people. The technology should also help advance the pace of drug research and discovery.
Of course, if Duncan's test proves useful, it seems entirely possible that CDI will begin looking into the direct-to-consumer market. But even if doesn't, it points toward a future where we can test out chemicals, drugs and other inputs on our bodies in a relatively risk-free way.