Advance furthers stem cells for use in drug discovery, cell therapy

This week, a UW–Madison team reports in Nature Biomedical Engineering that they have jumped a major hurdle on the path toward wider use of stem cells.

Using an automated screening test that they devised, William Murphy, a professor of biomedical engineering, and colleagues Eric Nguyen and William Daly have invented an all-chemical replacement for  the confusing, even dangerous materials, now used to grow these delicate cells.

“We set out to create a simple, completely synthetic material that would support stem cells without the issues of unintended effects and lack of reproducibility,” Murphy says. Read the full Article here.  Read the full paper here.