After many years of more or less ignoring the topic, big pharmaceutical companies (revenue in excess of $3 billion) finally are paying attention to stem cells as vehicles of drug testing and future regenerative medicine therapies. The pioneering and highly risky stem cell field has been so far mostly the domain of academic laboratories and small biotech companies.
But these days big pharmas finally started to cooperate with both academia and startups and invest in the range of couple millions of dollars. Some signs of the upcoming trend: GlaxoSmithKline and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) recently (in July, 2008) announced a five-year, $25 million-plus collaborative agreement while Pfizer has already invested $3 million in shares of EyeCyte a La Jolla based early stage stem/progenitor cell-based ophthalmology research and development company.
Stem Cells for Safer Medicines, or SC4SM, a collaboration to develop stem cells for safety testing of new drugs through a public-private partnership and an independent not-for-profit company is backed by 3 European big pharmas, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Roche.
A higher form of involvement means in-house research labs and Pfizer is on that road too with its functional “regenerative medicine unit” in Cambridge, Mass. and with the plans to open another similar shop in the other Cambridge, overseas around this November.
On the drug testing platform stem cell mediated results can be expected much sooner than in the case of an efficient and safe stem cell therapy. According to a 2006 data it takes $1.318 billion and 10-15 years to develop a traditional pharmaceutical drug but no data available on the costs and timeframe of a stem cell based regenerative therapy.

If big pharmas are really risk-taking and invest enough money in stem cell trials in the range of hundreds of million of dollars and if no serious complications occur during the trials then by 2020 or by and large within a decade we can expect some important results from those companies.

But here we should really consider the state of global economy as a big ballast and the tough times in the pharma industry.

What can be expect though with a bigger certainty is that within a decade most of the big pharmas will seriously flirt with stem cells the in the form of setting up in-house research labs, investing in biotech startups and collaborating with the academy.

Sources:

http://www.sc4sm.org/
http://seekingalpha.com/article/79266-pharmaceutical-facts-investors-should-know
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharmaceutical_companies