“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 …
In your body, blood stem cells produce approximately 10 billion new white blood cells, which are also known as immune cells, each and every day. Even more remarkably, if some of these blood stem cells fail to do their part, then other blood stem cells pick up their slack and overproduce whichever specific type of …
USC Stem Cell researchers from the laboratory of Min Yu have positive news for patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), the most deadly type of breast cancer. By inhibiting a protein called TAK1, postdoc Oihana Iriondo and her colleagues reduced lung metastases in mice with TNBC, as described in a new study in Nature Communications.
With captions by Kella Vangsness “As an artist and scientist, I cannot help but imagine stem cells as ‘superheroes’ fighting against ‘villains’ of disease,” said Kella Vangsness, who is graduating from USC with a master’s degree in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine.
If you lose a limb, it’s lost for life. If you damage a kidney, you won’t grow a new one. And if you have a heart attack, the scars are there to stay. But regenerative medicine is poised to change all of this. Building new tissue is within sight, and USC scientists are among the …
Stem cell therapies have accelerated at a promising pace, but how do they work? And what are stem cells?
In USC’s Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, half of the faculty members are assistant professors, poised at the threshold of their careers in biomedical research. One of these promising pioneers, ALS researcher Justin Ichida, has been chosen as the first of four USC Richard N. Merkin Scholars. Ichida and his fellow scholars, …
When physicist Richard Feynman died in 1988, he left a message scrawled across his chalkboard: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Twenty years later, scientists in a very different field repeatedly invoked his words at the Junior Faculty Candidate Mini-symposium, hosted by USC’s Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine on March …
Researchers are hard at work building mini-kidneys from human cells—using blueprints mostly drawn from lab mice. But mouse kidneys differ from their human counterparts in more than mere scale, as detailed by the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Andy McMahon in three studies in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
