Message from Chancellor Fox: One of UCSD’s greatest institutional strengths is the breadth and depth of faculty research on a range of important topics. Each month, Chancellor’s Corner will showcase cross-disciplinary faculty expertise in a specific area. I invite you to learn more about the work of these scholars, and I hope you share my pride in their achievements and their contributions to society.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine recently awarded the first grants from Proposition 71 focused solely on human embryonic stem cell research. The UCSD faculty members and researchers profiled below are among the grant recipients. 

STEM CELL RESEARCH

Shu Chien, University Professor & Chair
Dr. Chien and his colleagues have developed an array system (with thousands of combinations) that allows the rapid determination of the optimum physical and chemical conditions that direct the differentiation of stem cells into specific cell types. The ability to control stem cell differentiation to desired cell types is crucial for the use of human embryonic stem cells for regenerative medicine, and hence the results of this study will be valuable for almost all types of stem cell research.  More…

Anirvan Ghosh, Professor of Biology
Ghosh is researching whether forebrain neurons can be generated from human embryonic stem cells. Several neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, are characterized by loss of forebrain neurons. Scientists believe cell replacement might provide a therapeutic strategy if they could generate neurons that had the same properties as the cells that are lost. While scientists have previously generated neurons from embryonic stem cells, Ghosh’s project seeks to specifically generate forebrain neurons from embryonic stem cells and determine if they can make connections with existing neurons in the brain. More…

Lawrence S.B. Goldstein, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, UCSD School of Medicine
Dr. Goldstein is researching Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive, incurable disease that robs people of their memory and ability to think and reason.  Currently, there is no effective treatment for this disease, and there is a tremendous need to better understand the cellular basis of Alzheimer’s disease so that such treatments can be developed.  Goldstein is studying key genetic clues that come from a rare familiar form of the disease, which suggest that early defects in the physical transport system responsible for long-distance movements of information in neurons can cause neuronal dysfunction.  This failure of the neurons is predicted to initiate a series of events that results in the classic plaques and tangles that characterize the disease.  Goldstein’s lab will use human embryonic stem cells to generate human neuronal models of hereditary Alzheimer’s disease in order to test various hypotheses about the cause of the disease, as well as test new drugs for its treatment. More…

Catriona Jamieson, Assistant Professor of Medicine,
Hematologic Malignancies Program
Dr. Jamieson is researching cancer stem cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. Compelling studies suggest that human cancer stem cells (CSC) arise from aberrantly self-renewing, tissue-specific stem or progenitor cells which are responsible for cancer propagation and therapeutic resistance. Human embryonic stem cells can provide a potentially limitless source of tissue-specific stem and progenitor cells in vitro, so represent an ideal model system for generating and characterizing human cancer stem cells. This research harbors tremendous potential for developing life-saving therapy for patients with cancer by providing a platform to rapidly and rationally test new therapies. More…

Martin Marsala, Professor, Anesthesiology Cancer Symptom Control Program
Dr. Marsala hopes his research with human embryonic stem cells will one day soon allow people who are suffering from spinal ischemic injury to improve their motor function.  Ischemia-induced paraplegia, often combined with spasticity and rigidity of muscles, is a serious complication that sometimes occurs when patients undergo a surgical procedure to repair an aortic aneurysm.  These symptoms also occur in many patients with traumatic spinal injuries, and currently there is no treatment that leads to a permanent improvement in symptoms and ambulatory function.  Marsala’s recent animal studies have demonstrated that spinal transplantation of rat and human neurons leads to significant improvement in motor function.  The CIRM grant will fund additional experiments to characterize the therapeutic potential of human blastocyst-derived neuronal precursors when grafted to areas of spinal ischemic injury. More…

Cornelis Murre, Professor of Biology
Murre is working on a research project to generate long-term multi-potential human hematopoietic progenitor cell lines from human embryonic stem cell cells. If successful, the strategy would create cells that could be used to readily generate specific hematopoietic cell types, such as lymphocytes or dendritic cells, on a large scale for cell-based therapeutic approaches. More…

Bing Ren, Assistant Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine
Dr. Renis working on a research project to provide a foundation for analysis of the mechanisms that control the production of stem cell proteins, which in turn would help in the design of new ways to manipulate the stem cells so they can differentiate toward specified cell types.  The knowledge base resulting from this research will directly support the effort by Ren and other California researchers to investigate the mechanisms of stem cell biology, and design new stem cell therapies. More…

Yang Xu, Associate Professor of Biology
Xu is investigating two major mechanisms that are thought to maintain genetic stability in human embryonic stem cells.  His research is aimed at identifying pathways that promote efficient DNA repair as well as pathways that regulate self-renewing capabilities of these stem cells in the absence and presence of DNA damage.  The goal is to promote efficient self-renewal of human embryonic stem cells with minimum genetic instability – critical for the development of human therapeutics. A major objective of Xu’s proposed research is to improve the genetic manipulation technologies of human embryonic stem cells, including transgenic and gene-targeting technologies, in order to significantly improve scientists’ capability to generate disease-specific human stem cell lines. More…

Binhai Zheng, Assistant Professor Department of Neurosciences
Zheng is working on a research project to apply genetically modified human embryonic stem cells to study basic functions of human genes in spinal cord development and to develop therapeutic intervention for spinal cord injury. More…

Sylvia Evans, Associate Adjunct Professor of Medicine
Sylvia Evans is researching human embryonic stem cells aimed at developing therapies for heart failure and cardiac pacemaker dysfunction. To repair of human heart, it is important to study human cardiac progenitors and to define pathways required to grow and differentiate them utilizing human cells as a model experimental system. Evans’ lab will create special lines of human embryonic stem cells that become fluorescent when they adopt the cardiac progenitor, heart muscle, or pacemaker state, with the aim of obtaining sufficient numbers of specific cell types for cardiac therapy. More…

** To learn more about other campus faculty scholars and areas of expertise, please visit the searchable UCSD Faculty Experts Database at: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/facultyExperts/