Pluripotent Stem Cells in Toxicity Testing: An Omics Approach

Abstract

Traditional approaches to toxicological testing are expensive and time consuming usually involving exposure of chemicals to large numbers of animals during the crucial period of organ development. In order to provide cost-efficient and high-throughput methods, various in vitro test systems have been proposed to access toxicity for environmental toxicants and many drugs. Although effective, these platforms are based on in vitro cell cultures and ex vivo models using embryo cultures and often do not accurately interpret results for human safety because of interspecies difference and/or the inability to reproduce human physiology. To address this problem, a humanized system, pluripotent stem cells were introduced to study toxicity of drugs.