Heart Repair with Human Tissue Engineered Myocardium
Heart disease is the number one cause of morbidity and mortality in the US. With an estimated 1.5 million new or recurrent myocardial infarctions, the total economic burden on our…
Characterization and Engineering of the Cardiac Stem Cell Niche
Despite therapeutic advances, cardiovascular disease remains a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in both California and Europe. New insights into disease pathology, models to expedite in vitro testing and…
Developing a therapeutic candidate for Canavan disease using induced pluripotent stem cell
Canavan disease is a devastating disease of infants which affects their neural development and leads to mental retardation and early death. It occurs in 1 in 6,400 persons in the…
Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells to Heal Chronic Diabetic Wounds
Diabetic foot ulcers (DFU), chronic, non-healing wounds on the feet of diabetic patients, present a serious challenge to global health. These ulcers affect between 15-25% of the 18-21 million Americans…
Crosstalk: Inflammation in Parkinson’s disease (PD) in a humanized in vitro model
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is the most common neurodegenerative movement disorder. It is characterized by motor impairment such as slowness of movements, shaking and gait disturbances. Age is the most consistent…
Dual targeting of tyrosine kinase and BCL6 signaling for leukemia stem cell eradication
Leukemia is the most frequent form of cancer in children and teenagers, but is also common in adults. Chemotherapy has vastly improved the outcome of leukemia over the past four…
Using patient-specific iPSC derived dopaminergic neurons to overcome a major bottleneck in Parkinson’s disease research and drug discovery
The goals of this study are to develop patient-specific induced pluripotent cell lines (iPSCs) from patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) with defined mutations and sporadic forms of the disease. Recent…
Embryonic-Derived Neural Stem Cells for Treatment of Motor Sequelae following Sub-cortical Stroke
A stroke kills brain cells by interrupting blood flow. The most common “ischemic stroke” is due to blockage in blood flow from a clot or narrowing in an artery. Brain…
Development of a clinical-grade extracorporeal liver support system using human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived hepatic cells
Liver failure is the fourth leading cause of adult death in California. Because liver cells can regenerate, some patients with liver failure could be saved without having to undergo organ…
User-friendly predictive molecular diagnostic assays for quality control of stem cell derivatives for transplantation and drug discovery
Three years ago, with help from CIRM funding, we developed an assay. This is a genomics-base diagnostic assay, similar to those now used for diagnosing cancers; but in our case,…