The directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) towards the hematopoietic lineages would be an invaluable tool for regenerative medicine, providing cells for both transplantation and in vitro analysis. As the PSC system has been shown to recapitulate developmental events in vitro, it is also a powerful model system for developmental biology, being the only method to-date that allows interrogation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate human development. Furthermore, the recent technological advancement to generate induced hPSCs offers the potential to model not only development, but also disease in a dish.
Our Research
Understanding human primitive and definitive hematopoietic development; understanding the endothelial-to-hematopoietic transition in hemogenic endothelium, ultimately giving rise to an HSC; and modeling hematopoietic disease with iPSC
Our people
We are currently a group of 5 scientists— Christopher Sturgeon, PhD, our lab manager, two postdoctoral fellows, and our research assistant.
Tour the lab
Take a sneak peak at the lab in action
The focus of the lab is to elucidate the signaling pathways governing the specification of both hematopoietic programs using hPSC directed differentiation. Through this we aim to better understand the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation that controls HSC development, and identify methods to specify a transplantable HSC in the dish.