Due to the patient-driven exemplar combined with prolife ethics, scientists with the are working on a way to use human stem cells to save lives that will also sculpt the future of the medical field.

The director and founder of the institute Dr. Alan Moy spoke with the Catholic News Agency in February to explain his motivation for the “Collection for Cures” project. He said, “Medical research is becoming too expensive and taking too long. It’s not transformative enough, or impacting patients at a fast enough rate.”

In regards to the institute’s attention to patients and their needs, Dr. Moy said, “It’s more than just doing ethical research. We had to come up with a new paradigm.”

The Catholic bishop of Iowa and the Knights of Columbus are both in support of “Collection for Cures”. The project goal is to raise ten million dollars to pay for the cost of conducting stem cell research in order to find cures for rare diseases, develop personalized treatments for cancer patients and design medicine with regenerative powers.

In 2005, following the founding of Cellular Engineering Technologies, Dr. Moy noticed that there were areas of research that both the marketplace and the government were neglecting. Dr. Moy recognized the need for nonprofit enterprise to fill the technological and scientific gaps.

The next year, Dr. Moy built the John Paul Stem Cell Research Institute of Iowa City, Iowa. It was a grassroots effort by those worried about the future of ethical biotechnology. Dr. Moy noted, “The goal of the institute is to identify and solve some of the major deficiencies in this country – one of which is the ethical issues surrounding embryonic stem cells.”

Although the work of Dr. Moy’s team is popular in the field based on their prolife ethics, there are other reasons for such recognition. For example, Dr. Moy has also expressed an interest in the treatment and cure of orphan diseases. Orphan diseases are a large number of serious but rare illnesses that often fail to obtain research funding. The lack of funding is primarily due to the low number of people actually affected by these rare disorders.

Some of these rare ailments may respond to treatments with drugs that have already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. However, drug companies are not interested is the effort it would take to identify such possible applications.

On the contrary, Dr. Moy is interested in using adult human stem cells in disease specific treatments to test the effectiveness on currently available therapies and medications on these rare afflictions. His techniques save both time and money on research protocol that involves tests conducted on lab animals prior to any tests conducted on human tissue.