After becoming chief pathologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Wisconsin Regional Primate Center in 1995, James A. Thomson began his pioneering work in deriving embryonic stem cells from isolated embryos. That same year, Thomson published his first paper, "Isolation of a Primate Embryonic Stem Cell Line," in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, detailing the first derivation of primate embryonic stem cells. In the following years, Thomson and his team of scientists - Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor, Sander S. Shapiro, Michelle A. Waknitz, Jennifer J. Swiergiel, Vivienne S. Marshall, and Jeffry M. Jones - advanced their work with embryonic stem cells, eventually isolating and culturing human embryonic stem cells. Their work with human embryos was reported in the 1998 Nature article "Embryonic Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Blastocysts."

Irving Lerner Weissman is a researcher and professor in developmental biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. Weissman is also a professor of pathology and Virginia & D. K. Ludwig professor of clinical investigation in cancer at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Weissman studies the biology of stem cells and immune cells and has conducted research in those fields during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the late 1980s, Weissman’s team developed methods to identify hematopoietic stem cells, or HSCs, which give rise to the body’s blood and immune cells. Also, in the early 2000s, Weissman also co-authored California’s Proposition 71, which secured three billion dollars in state funding for stem cell research after the federal government restricted human embryonic stem cell work. Weissman’s efforts have demonstrated the therapeutic potential of stem cell transplantation in the treatment of diseases, including blood cancer.

In the 1990s, John E. Dick and Dominique Bonnet, researchers at the University of Toronto, in Toronto, Ontario, investigated how a blood cancer called acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, arises from blood-forming cells. Researchers in the field at the time did not know which cells initiate and maintain AML in the body, and there were conflicting hypotheses about which cells were responsible. Scientists hypothesized that AML might be mainly composed of more specialized and differentiated blood cells. Dick and Bonnet conducted experiments in which they grew human AML cells in mice and investigated which cells initiated and maintained the cancer to explore that hypothesis. Their study was one of the first to use sensitive mouse models to characterize and uncover which cells initiated and comprised AML, which contributed to the understanding of its cellular origin and aided in the development of targeted therapies for leukemia treatment.