Scientist: Stem cells could end animal testing – CNN.com

LONDON, England (CNN) -- As well as their potential for creating effective therapies for debilitating diseases, embryonic stem cells could open the door to improved pharmaceutical drug testing, according to a leading British stem cell researcher.

Embryonic stem cells seen pictured through a microscope viewfinder in a laboratory.

Speaking at a recent meeting of the British Pharmacological Society in Brighton, UK, Christine Mummery described how using embryonic stem cells to create human heart cells could be a viable and scientifically exciting alternative to animal testing.

Mummery, a Professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands told CNN: "It could save a lot of time and effort of taking the wrong drugs through, or it may allow drugs through which are lost at an early stage, because they affect the animal cells but don't have an effect on human cells.

"It may also allow more and better drugs to come through the first tests or flag up safety issues at an earlier stage."

Drug development is an incredibly expensive and protracted process. Typically, it costs around $1 billion to bring a new drug to market and the whole process usually takes about ten years.

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Before new drugs can go forward for clinical trials, it's necessary for the chemical compounds which make up a drug to undergo thousands of tests for toxicity before beginning trials on animals -- initially on rodents and then often on dogs.

It's here, at this ethically sensitive stage, that Professor Mummery believes stem cell research could transform drug development.

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Scientist: Stem cells could end animal testing - CNN.com