Impact of drug discovery on stem cell biology

Despite the rapid technical progress in pharmaceutical industry in the past decade, it is still a great challenge to find new drugs and the situation seems more and more serious. However, the history of pharmaceutical industry clearly indicated that the significance of drug discovery went far beyond providing new drugs. For instance, drugs or candidates could be used as selective probes to reveal novel cellular mechanisms, which is a fundamental tenet of chemical biology. More interestingly, accumulating evidence indicates that drugs and candidates can find important use in stem cell biology. Not only approved drugs but also undeveloped pharmacological agents could serve as efficient agents to regulate stem cell fate. Moreover, the target and activity knowledge accumulated during the drug discovery process will help select the stem cell fate modulators in a rational manner. As the progress in stem cell biology will bring positive influence to drug discovery, it can be expected that the current drug discovery efforts will finally bear great fruits in the future.