Susan Solomon: The promise of research with stem cells

ORIGINAL: TED

Calling them "our bodies' own repair kits," Susan Solomon advocates research using lab-grown stem cells. By growing individual pluripotent stem cell lines, her team creates testbeds that could accelerate research into curing diseases -- and perhaps lead to individualized treatment, targeted not just to a particular disease but a particular person.

Susan Solomon enables support for human stem cell research, aiming to cure major diseases and empower more personalized medicine. Photo: TED

Why you should listen to her:

Susan Solomon’s health care advocacy stems from personal medical trials—namely, her son’s Type 1 diabetes and her mother’s fatal cancer. Following a successful career as a lawyer and business entrepreneur, Solomon, frustrated by the slow pace of medical research, was inspired to use those skills to follow another passion: accelerating medical research with real-world results as a social entrepreneur. And through her own research and conversations with medical experts, she decided that stem cells (cells that have the ability to morph into any other kind of cell) had the greatest potential to impact peoples’ health.

In 2005, Solomon founded the New York Stem Cell Foundation, now one of the largest nonprofit research institutions and laboratories in this field in the world. The NYSCF Research Institute conducts all facets of stem cell research from growing the cells to drug discovery.

At TEDGlobal 2012, Solomon announced the NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array, the new technology to create thousands of stem cell avatars and genetically array them to functionalize the data from the human genome to revolutionize the way we develop cures and treatments so they are better, safer, less expensive and happen much more quickly.

"Susan Solomon is a hero for stem cell scientists and hopeful patients around the world."Kevin Eggan, Harvard University