Disease Focus: Neurological Disorders
Studying neurotransmission of normal and diseased human ES cell-derived neurons in vivo
Stem cells, including human embryonic stem cells, provide extraordinary new opportunities to model human diseases and may serve as platforms for drug screening and validation. Especially with the ever-improving effective and safe methodologies to produce genetically identical human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), increasing number of patient-specific iPSCs will be generated, which will enormously facilitate […]
Viral-host interactions affecting neural differentiation of human progenitors
Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is the major cause of birth defects, almost all of which are neuronal in origin. Approximately 1% of newborns are infected, and of the 13% that are symptomatic at birth, 50% will have severe permanent hearing deficits, vision loss, motor impairment, and mental retardation. At least 14% of asymptomatic infants also will […]
Investigation of synaptic defects in autism using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a group of neurodevelopmental diseases that occur in as many as 1 in 150 children in the United States. Three hallmarks of autism are dysfunctional communication, impaired social interaction, and restricted and repetitive interests and activities. Even though no single genetic defect has been ascribed to having a causative role […]
Triplet Repeat Instability in Human iPSCs
Over twenty human genetic diseases are caused by expansion of simple DNA sequences composed of repeats of three nucleotides (such as CAG, CTG, CGG and GAA) within essential genes. These repeats can occur within the region of a gene that encodes the protein, generally resulting in proteins with large stretches of repeats of just one […]
Neural and general splicing factors control self-renewal, neural survival and differentiation
Human embryonic and patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells have the remarkable capacity to differentiate into many cell-types, including neurons, thus enabling the modeling of human neurological diseases in vitro, and permit the screening of molecules to correct diseases. Maintaining the pluripotent state of the stem cell, directing the stem cell towards a neuronal lineage, keeping […]
Generation and characterization of corticospinal neurons from human embryonic stem cells
A major goal of stem cell research is to generate various functional human cell types that can be used to better understand how these cells work and to use them directly in therapies. There are currently no effective treatments, let alone a cure, for many neurological conditions. Two particular devastating neurological conditions, spinal cord injury […]
Understanding the role of LRRK2 in iPSC cell models of Parkinson’s Disease
The goal of this research is to utilize novel research tools to investigate the molecular mechanisms that cause Parkinson’s disease (PD). The proposed work builds on previous funding from CIRM that directed the developed patient derived models of PD. The majority of PD patients suffer from sporadic disease with no clear etiology. However some PD […]
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for Tissue Regeneration
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have tremendous potential for patient-specific cell therapies, which bypasses immune rejection issues and ethical concerns for embryonic stem cells (ESCs). However, to fully harness the therapeutic potential of iPSCs, many fundamental issues of cell transplantation remain to be addressed, e.g., how iPSC-derived cells participate in tissue regeneration, which type of […]
Cellular tools to study brain diseases affecting synaptic transmission
There is a group of brain diseases that are caused by functional abnormalities. The brains of patients afflicted with these diseases which include autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, depression, and mania and other psychiatric diseases have a normal appearance and show no structural changes. Neurons, the cellular units of the brain, function by making connections (or […]
Use of iPS cells (iPSCs) to develop novels tools for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy.
Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) is one of the most common lethal genetic diseases in children. One in thirty five people carry a mutation in a gene called survival of motor neurons 1 (SMN1) which is responsible for this disease. If two carriers have children together they have a one in four chance of having a […]