More On Stem Cells And Osteoporosis

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A nice long piece at Medical News Today discusses movement towards controlling stem cells to treat osteoporosis (age-related bone loss, or "brittle bone disease"). The ability to quickly discover compounds that cause stem cells to differentiate into specific types of mature cell - bone cells in this case - is one of the great benefits of bioinformatics. Advances in computing, automation and miniaturization mean that hundreds of thousands of compounds can be screened in the time it once took to check a dozen outcomes. This allows scientists to skip directly to the answer, as it were - new biochemistry is being uncovered in a year of work where it would once have taken a decade or more.

Link: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=12975