Linking Scattered Stem Cell-Based Data to Advance Therapeutic Development

The biomedical field has witnessed remarkable advances in analytical tools and technologies that have expanded our understanding of healthy and diseased human tissue and, at the same time, enable extensive molecular characterization of living cells. The volume of scientific data generated is expanding in an unprecedented manner; however, these data remain scattered across research groups worldwide. Access to various data sources in a systematic fashion could hugely benefit the progress of nascent fields such as stem cell-based therapeutics. We explore here the currently available databases for stem cell research, and we propose creating a common portal to access these different databases that could act as a translational link between basic and clinical research to advance stem cell-based therapeutic development.