Joanna Smeeton runs a lab at Columbia University that uses zebrafish to understand joint tissue regeneration and develop new approaches for treating ligament injuries and arthritis. But before receiving a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) Scholars grant to pursue her postdoctoral training at USC, she had never worked with either zebrafish or joints.
“That training grant was instrumental to my career success,” said Smeeton, who is the H.K. Corning Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine Research at Columbia University. “It was the first major fellowship I had gotten for this research into osteoarthritis and joints. So the training grant did exactly what it was designed to do, because it set the foundations for what we’re doing now in my lab.”
A born scientist, Smeeton showed an early interest in biology and the natural world. As a high school student in the city of St. Catharines near Niagara Falls in Ontario, she developed a fascination for one of the body’s most intricate organs: the kidney. She majored in anatomy and cell biology at McGill University in Montreal, and studied kidney development in Norman Rosenblum’s lab at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto.
As a postdoc in Gage Crump’s lab at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, Smeeton shifted her focus from kidney development to cartilage regeneration. In a 2016 paper in eLife, she published a breakthrough discovery that zebrafish can be used to study arthritis.
After her two years as a CIRM Scholar, Smeeton secured a prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) Pathway to Independence Award. Known as the K99/R00, the award helped her transition from the postdoctoral to the faculty stage of her career.
The transition was anything but easy. Two months after accepting her faculty position at Columbia University, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and she and her husband Jeremy found themselves housebound with their three-year-old twins.
“They weren’t even in school or daycare or anything during the initial lockdown, so it was just us locked in our apartment for months with our three-year-olds,” she said. “It kept us a bit sane, because we had to have that daily schedule: get them up, feed them, do an activity. The playgrounds were closed for a bit, so we would drive out into the countryside, run around in a national forest or just a random empty field in New Jersey. It gave the day some structure. I wasn’t just baking sourdough. We had to keep these kids entertained!”
Meanwhile, she launched her lab remotely.
“It was hard,” she said. “My first PhD student’s rotation was remote, so we would meet once a week and talk about data analysis—for months. We didn’t know when we were going to be allowed back in the lab. I wrote another couple of papers with Gage during that time. But then as stuff loosened, it was a soft launch to the lab.”
In 2022, Smeeton secured the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to study whole joint regeneration in zebrafish. By studying the regeneration of an entirely new jaw joint structure, Smeeton and her lab seek to understand the formation of joints, ligaments, and cartilage—including how injury activates the process, how molecular signals drive specific types of cells, and how new tissue integrates with old tissue.
In addition, she’s embarking on new, innovative projects studying the role of pain in skeletal regeneration.
“When is pain a good thing? When is it a bad thing? What kind of analgesics actually impair regeneration outcomes and why?” she said. “Because there’s evidence that some painkillers block stem cell behavior, and so we’re trying to untangle that and use our zebrafish injuries to look at that.”
She’s also a co-investigator on a $38.95 million project, funded by Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), to make living replacement knee joints from biomaterials and human stem cells. Called NOVAJoint, this biologic knee replacement is being developed with the goal of entering human clinical trials within five years.
“Part of the satisfaction of working in academic research is that you don’t know where the science is going to go,” said Smeeton. “I love when my trainees come into my office and ask: do you want to see this cool thing on the microscope? Of course, I want to see this cool thing on the microscope. I live for those moments.”
Smeeton’s lab has now grown to 11 members. Her first PhD student, who was onboarded remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, is set to defend his dissertation this fall.
Just as CIRM once invested in Smeeton’s training, she now invests in training the next generation of scientists to perform innovative stem cell research and to develop new therapies for patients.
“That’s a new and exciting thing for me: to see that continuity of the next generation,” said Smeeton. “Building a team is super gratifying and seeing the growth in the trainees. It’s pushing these people further on their journey.”