**Author details**

**7. Conclusion and future perspective**

190 Pluripotent Stem Cell Biology - Advances in Mechanisms, Methods and Models

novel biomarkers of toxicity.

**Acknowledgements**

robust methods for accurate detection of toxicity.

Improved toxicity testing methods complementing advanced in vitro assays are very crucial in reducing the rate of attrition in final stages of product development. To avoid failures and withdrawals, there is an absolute need for integration of all available technologies to minimize cumbersome process of trials and expenses and eventually reduce the increasing costs of bringing a new drug into market. Supplementing toxicology evaluation methods, such as histopathology, physiology and clinical chemistry with transcriptomics, proteomics and metabonomics could provide new insights into the mechanisms underlying toxicological pathologies. Integration of in vitro toxicology technologies, with systems biology methods resulted in 'systems toxicology'. Expansion of open source databases and analytical platforms is critical to the discovery of novel biomarkers of toxicity. So far, the available approaches for discovery of biomarkers included toxicogenomics, toxicoproteomics, metabonomics and bioinformatics analyses (systems biology approach) while the technologies available for quantification include ELISA, solid phase ELISA, Luminex technology and patterned paper technology [50]. Individual technologies have limited usefulness unless the data generated from these assay platforms and '-omics' discovery technologies are integrated. The discovery of DNA microarrays and protein chips has made information exchanges extraordinarily easy, convenient and quick. Integration of information from these powerful sources using analytical computing software products, noncommercial databases, and advances in hi-throughput technology is the future of the next phase in the identification, selection and qualification of

Future of toxicogenomics lies in developing a more refined understanding of molecular mechanisms related to specific toxicologies, to elucidate molecular signatures associated with the prediction of biomarkers or panels of biomarkers with support from the field of transcrip‐ tomics, metabolomics, and proteomics. These analytical tools applied to the emerging human PSC-based in vitro platforms utilizing their organ-specific differentiated derivatives, such as CMs, hepatocytes and neurons, have a great potential to revolutionize the field of toxicology. However, the full potential of these human in vitro cell-based platforms in predicting toxicity of compounds in humans will be realized only with further improvements in derivation of highly standardized, well-defined and homogeneous cell populations that functionally and structurally strongly resemble their adult counterparts and development of sensitive and

The work in the author's laboratories is supported by the European Union FP7 Program, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Else-Kröner-Fresenius Stiftung, Excellence Research Support Program of the University of Cologne and Köln Fortune Program. Shiva Prasad Potta2 , Tomo Šarić<sup>1</sup> , Michael Heke1 , Harinath Bahudhanapati2 and Jürgen Hescheler1\*

\*Address all correspondence to: J.Hescheler@uni-koeln.de

1 Center for Physiology and Pathophysiology, Institute for Neurophysiology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

2 Tulip Bio-Med Solutions (P) Ltd., Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India
