Researchers and doctors hope that stem cell studies will help in:

• Increase knowledge about how diseases occur. By watching the maturation of stem cells into cells in bone, heart muscle, nerves, and other organs and tissues, researchers and doctors could better understand how diseases and disorders evolve.
• Generate healthy cells to replace diseased cells (regenerative medicine). Stem cells can be guided to become specific cells that can be used to regenerate and repair diseased or damaged tissue in people who have been affected.
• People who could benefit from stem cell therapies, but they are not limited to those with spinal cord injuries, type 1 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, stroke, burns, cancer, and osteoarthritis.

Stem cells may have the ability to grow into new tissue for use in transplantation and regenerative medicine.

Evaluate the safety and efficacy of new drugs. Before new drugs are used in people, some types of stem cells are useful for testing the safety and quality of investigational drugs. This type of test will likely impact the development of drugs based on cardiac toxicity analysis.

One of the new areas of study is the efficacy of using human stem cells that have been programmed into tissue-specific cells to test new drugs. In order for the testing of new drugs to be accurate, cells must be programmed to take on the properties of the type of cells to be tested. Techniques for programming cells into specific cells are still under study. For example, neurons could be generated to test a new drug for neuropathy. The test results could show if the new drug had any positive effect on the cells or if they were damaged.