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Sigma Aldrich
www.sigmaaldrich.com
Sigma-Aldrich has long been known as a world-class, worldwide supplier of products that support all fields of biology and chemistry. Our ability to serve the needs of our customers, our reputation as being a reliable supplier of quality products, and our expertise in the custom and industrial manufacturing arena have given us the leverage to become a leader in stem cell research and regenerative medicine. We are able to offer products along every phase of the Regenerative Medicine workflow, from basic research and continuing on through to the therapeutic market. Currently, we can offer more than 1100 products from across all of our Life Science business units that are being used by our customers for stem cell research.
In any field of science every discovery is the culmination of a number of processes or series of steps to provide a complete set of data. As very few, if any regenerative medicine scientists focus on one particular technique or method (such as RNAi or Immunohistochemistry) we have built the regenerative medicine program to address all of the steps along the stem cell research workflow.
Based on the way our stem cell customers approach their work we have aligned our existing products and have implemented a new product development plan that will assure that our customers’ needs are met at every step in the workflow. As we continue to build the Regenerative Medicine program we are developing our product platform to support 3 related, but separate markets:
* Regenerative Medicine - Therapeutic Market, DMF’s and cGMP manufacturing
* Basic Research - Addresses Academic Research and Clinical Research Institutes
* Drug Discovery - Drug Metabolism/ADMET, Cell-based Assays, HTS and HCS
As we move forward in our platform development we have initiated a ‘protocols’ landing page that will serve as an information center and a forum for stem cell scientists. Not only will researchers have an opportunity to post important information to this site in any electronic format (html, Power Point, PDF, video, etc), we will also provide a direct link to our product management staff for inquiries and business development opportunities. We encourage you to visit our home page at www.sigmaaldrich.com/stembio and give us your feedback.
As we move forward we will introduce disease-focused modules as an additional resource for scientists. The planned focus areas are blood and bone marrow-derived cancers, neurodegenerative disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and bone & cartilage regeneration. These modules will provide our customers who are interested in more therapeutically relevant areas an opportunity to find products, technical information, protocols, and many more additional resources all in one place.
As we continue to learn more about stem cells and their versatility it has become evident that they are and excellent tool for bridging the animal to human gap in drug discovery. Stem cells are very much in the forefront as tools for drug discovery, efficacy and toxicology. Utilizing stem cells for these applications certainly bridges the animal to human gap, the in vitro to in vivo gap and very likely means those compounds that reach phase I clinical trials are much more likely to proceed on to commercialization. If applied at the early stages of drug candidate development stem cell screening may detect unsuitable compounds that might otherwise continue along the pipeline to clinical trials, thus saving time, resources, money, as well as risk to patients.
Given sufficient markers for characterization of the specific cell type of interest, this method then yields a homogeneous cell population of sufficient density to conduct genomic, epigenetic, developmental, functional, and other cell-based assays that will in total determine the safety and efficacy of a given compound. We expect this field to expand into areas focused on genetic and epigenetic implications in drug safety, efficacy, and metabolism. As the need for tools and reagents to support this are of stem cell biology Sigma will remain in the forefront as a key supplier to support this critical work.