John McNeish, Pfizer

John is the executive director of regenerative medicine for Pfizer.

I really believe stem cell technology is at the tipping point -- and whenever you approach this kind of event it's very important to bring all the parties together.

We've been using stem cells as tools for drug discovery for 15 years now -- and my little sound bite is: better cells mean better drugs.

We've tried to take the lead in recognizing regenerative therapies, as well as cancer. We think that not so far in the distant future cells will actually be therapies, and that stem cells can be used to deliver therapies, to get drugs to where we need them to go.

Then there are combination therapies, in which your cell does both jobs -- delivers a molecule and acts as a healant itself.

iPS is all about making time go backwards . . . we have a lot of work to do with iPS cells and their derivatives.

Somewhere between 10 and 15% of all drugs brought into safety trials fail because of arrhythmia . . . so if we can make cardiomyocytes (heart cells) we could use them to prevent all those failures

They've done testing to show that cells in vitro behave exactly as they do in vivo under the influence of hundreds of drugs. This means that what happens to a living cell in the lab is exactly the same, functionally and chemically, as what happens to it inside a living body.

Small molecules modify stem cell fate . . .this gives us hope that you can identify drug-like molecules that will get stem cells to do what you want them to do in vivo.

He's talking about directed differentiation and tons and tons of testing in the lab followed by more of the same in animal models . . .

Reuters quote: "Pfizer quietly launches stem cell unit" He laughs at this. We are not hiding this, whatever they think. Couldn't they just have said "Pfizer launches stem cell unit?"

His speech rate is double what would be considered normal; probably he's going faster than usual because they got started a bit late and are trying to stay on schedule so people can make their planes.