As a young oral surgeon in China, Yang Chai often operated on babies born with cleft lips or palates. “You talk to the parents, and they were very emotional and trying find out why their kid got this cleft palate or other malformation in the face,” he said. “You can tell them all the statistics—one …
How do bones heal, and how could they heal better? The answer to these questions may lie in a newly discovered population of “messenger” cells, according to a recent USC Stem Cell study published in the journal eLife. “With nearly half a million patients in the U.S experiencing failed bone repair every year, stimulating these …
Cells should be treated as individuals, according to the scientists who presented research at the Junior Faculty Candidate Mini-symposium, hosted by USC’s Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine on February 5. While cells have traditionally been evaluated as populations, these up-and-coming scientists shared their frontier approaches for studying the specific features and activities …
Giorgia Quadrato loves a good challenge. That’s why USC’s newest assistant professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine currently spends her time growing 3D networks of human nerve cells, called brain organoids, in the laboratory. “I think studying the brain is, by definition, probably one of the most challenging fields of study,” she said. …
What causes joints to age, lose their regenerative capacity and succumb to arthritis, and how can we slow this process? To address these questions, the National Institutes of Health have awarded a $1.69 million research project grant to investigator Denis Evseenko, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the …
When it comes to sorting cells or other small particles, there’s no better place to do so than USC. The university’s Flow Cytometry Facility recently acquired two top-of-the-line cell sorters, the BD FACSymphony and the BioRad S3e, thanks to generous support from several USC sources.
Bone marrow transplants, which involve transplanting healthy blood stem cells, offer the best treatment for many types of cancers, blood disorders and immune diseases. Even though 22,000 of these procedures are performed each year in the US, much remains to be understood about how they work.
Oihana Iriondo, the newest Broad Postdoctoral Fellow, has always been curious about how things work.
“The field of stem cell biology is one of our great convergence opportunities,” said USC Provost Michael Quick, addressing an audience of biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, clinicians and many others. This diverse group came together for the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Symposium, hosted by USC Stem Cell and the USC Medicine, Engineering, Science and Humanities (MESH) …
Children are not as hard-headed as adults—in a very literal sense. Babies are born with soft spots and flexible joints called sutures at the junctions where various sections of their skull bones meet. If these sutures fuse prematurely, the skull cannot expand to accommodate the child’s growing brain—a serious birth defect called craniosynostosis that can …
It didn’t require plane tickets to bring together scientists from USC Stem Cell in Los Angeles and BCRegMed in Vancouver. During October’s Virtual Symposium, videoconferencing technology enabled these scientists to share ideas as if they were sitting in the same conference room—even though they were more than 1,200 miles apart.
Every minute of every day, your organs are using a complex language to communicate with each other about the basic physiological processes necessary for life—everything from blood pressure regulation to pH balance to metabolism. To decipher this little-known language, USC Stem Cell scientist Andy McMahon has joined forces with top scientists at Harvard and Stanford …
If you’re not going to complete your family by age 35, it’s time to freeze your eggs, according to Dr. Richard J. Paulson, director of USC Fertility. Egg freezing offers a shot at pausing the biological clock for patients who wish to preserve their fertility into their late forties. Even though eggs can be frozen …
A little over a year after arriving at USC, D’Juan Farmer has been awarded one of the most prestigious fellowships available to postdoctoral fellows. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program supports early-career life scientists from groups underrepresented in the life sciences. The fellows receive up to $1.4 million in funding …
Students and trainees took center stage at the annual retreat for USC’s Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. They presented their latest research to the 180 stem cell scientists who gathered at the event, held at the Pala Mesa Resort in Fallbrook, California this September.
Anyone with arthritis can appreciate how useful it would be if scientists could grow cartilage in the lab. To this end, Keck School of Medicine of USC scientists in the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Denis Evseenko, MD, PhD, collaborated with colleagues at several institutions to provide new insights into how gene activity drives the …
Two USC Stem Cell scientists have received new research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
From the brain to the bile, the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation is supporting innovative medical research by granting $100,000 awards to two assistant professors: Michael Bonaguidi in the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine; and Sanda Win in the Department of Medicine’s GI/Liver Division.
In the developing face, how do stem cells know whether to become cartilage, bones or teeth? To begin to answer this question, scientists from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Gage Crump tested the role of a key family of genes, called “Forkhead-domain transcription factors,” or Fox. Their findings appear in the journal Development.
Running early or running late can have big consequences—especially when it comes to the progenitor cells involved in human kidney development. According to a new study in Developmental Cell from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Andy McMahon, the progenitor cells that form the kidney’s filtering units, called nephrons, mature into entirely different types of …
