Year 2
We aim to understand how blood stem cells develop from blood vessels during development. We are also interested in learning whether the blood-making program can be turned back on in blood vessel cells for bloodproduction outside the human body. During the past year we have made progress in understanding early human hematopoiesis such that we have designed new tools that may enable us to try and generate hematopoietic cells in culture. We have also gained ground in refining our screening strategy that we hope to adapt for finding new regulators of blood development that can be used for culturing hematopoietic stem cells.