Last week, Fred Gage, a neuroscientist in California, reported that using a recent method in stem cell research called reprogramming, his lab can grow schizophrenic neurons in large quantities. Until this report, complex psychiatric diseases have been largely impenetrable to scientists and doctors because the human brain, where the defects causing mental disease reside, is impossible to access without drastic surgical interventions. But now cells from afflicted people can be grown in bulk and studied closely using all the technologies of our age?advanced microscopy, genomics, and drug discovery.

This advance dramatically changes the scientific landscape for prevention and treatment of human disease. Working in parallel with Gage, other scientists are attempting to model incurable diseases such as Alzheimer’s, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Juvenile diabetes. On April 29 and 30, international scientists meeting Seoul at a symposium held by Institut Pasteur Korea and Cha Stem Cell Institute, discussed how to combine stem cell research and drug discovery.

Gage’s work strikes a deep chord in me for several reasons. As a scientist, I appreciate it for what is-- a staggering technical achievement, unimaginable even ten years ago. Only a few years ago access to neuronal cells from individuals with diseases was unimaginable. The technology Gage and colleagues used only became available in 2006 when Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka discovered how to generate stem cells out of human skin cells. This type of stem cell can be kept in the laboratory, renewing themselves indefinitely, and then be manipulated to form any cell in the body?neurons, pancreatic, liver, blood, etc.

The potential of combining Yamanaka’s way of making stem cells with drug discovery is an unprecedented opportunity in the fight against chronic diseases. It is to study such cells that I came to Korea to work at Institut Pasteur Korea (IP-K) one year ago. For the previous ten years, I worked at Nature, a premier international science journal, handling stem cell and developmental biology papers. Because of Nature’s fame, and being the only former Nature editor living in Korea, I am the subject of some curiosity in the Korean scientific community and often asked why I came to Korea.

The answer lies in IP-K’s technology for finding potential drugs to reverse the disease state Patient-derived cell lines such as those created in the Gage lab has created are ideal for IP-K’s technology platform. IP-K is one of only a handful of places in the world that can perform drug discovery on cell models of disease.

But perhaps what resonates the most when I read Gage’s paper is my sense that this is truly a breakthrough for people who are suffering from diseases that afflict the brain. The lives of my grandmother and an aunt were ravaged by schizophrenia. Plagued by fear and paranoia, their potential as humans was vastly diminished because their brains couldn’t accurately perceive what was going on around them. Although highly intelligent women, they could not execute the delicate nuances of human behavior, so important for human success and survival.

One percent of the population has schizophrenia. We rarely know these people unless they’re friends or family members because usually by their mid-twenties, they become disabled to the point where we do not meet them socially or in the workplace. In the US, it is estimated that 30% of the homeless population suffers from a mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

By a lucky roll of the genetic dice, I didn’t get this disease. Given my family history, I easily could have. My DNA probably contains some of the genes responsible. But having dodged that bullet, it is still likely that I will at some point in my life be stricken by another chronic disease. It could be cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stroke, heart disease, respiratory disease…. Many of us will suffer from a chronic disease, and in the end be killed by it. Whatever this disease-- it will probably be a consequence of certain combinations of genes

In the last century, great progress was been made in curing infectious diseases, and now there are vaccines and drugs to prevent or cure most bacterial or viral infections. The fact that infectious diseases still go uncured in the world is mainly a consequence of the fact that they affect people in poor countries who are unable to pay for drugs or devote resources to finding cures.

Chronic diseases are much tougher to cure than infectious diseases, and they are the leading cause of mortality in the world, representing 60% of all deaths. They are caused by a combination of each person’s genes and his/her environment?their diets, amount of exercise, exposure to toxic chemicals, radiation, and sun. And many factors we don’t understand at all.

Unfortunately many chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease are death sentences. There is no way to delay the onset of these diseases, or slow their painful and debilitating course.

But what if scientists can get access to these diseased cells?say the neurons of someone with Parkinson’s, Alzheimers or Schizophrenia?grow them in lab, and really study them. Observe them, manipulate them, see what happens when you change their environment is changed? Ask what genes were lead to the disease? Ask what drugs can prevent it? The recent advances in stem cell science such as what Gage described means now scientists can do just that.

In 2010 Institut Pasteur Korea contacted me about being a scientific director here in Korea and after hearing about their technology platform, I immediately saw an opportunity to do something special. Scientists at IP-K have mastered technologies for creating cell-based disease models, and using them to search for drugs. IP-K is only six years old but has already had a compound to treat tuberculosis in pre-clinical testing, in the pipeline to become an effective drug and many other compounds in development. This is the perfect place to try to model chronic disease using stem cells.

I came to Korea with the specific intention of combining stem cell research with drug discovery because of the unique platform at Institut Pasteur Korea, I am eager to use these cells to discover an effective therapy, or even a cure for this destructive, stigmatizing disease. It seems we are at the perfect moment to make progress.

Something that keeps me awake at night is worrying that although we now have tools at hand, I won’t be able to find the financial resources to screen these cell lines. Gage and others are producing them and are providing them to other scientists for free. But drug discovery is expensive. Maintenance and repair of the very specialized microscopes and robots that we use are IP-K are enormously expensive. IP-K is one of the few places in the world that can do it, but it’s a struggle.

So like other scientists, I furiously apply for grants and hope to make it work. Korea is funding stem cell research in a big way, and its economic state is more secure than other places in the world right now, and IP-K is uniquely positioned in Korea to realize my hopes of finding therapies by combining stem cell research with drug discovery.