Grant: Operating Grant

Bone marrow transplantation saves the lives of several patients suffering from diseases ranging from infection to cancer. This is due to blood stem cells that are found in the bone marrow and are capable of regenerating the entire blood system when transplanted into the patient. If not for the limited number of available and compatible blood stem cells, a situation similar to organ shortage, many more patients would benefit from this cell therapy. Recently, our lab and others have shown that cells rarely available from a patient can be changed into other cells types, such as turning skin cells into blood cells. This process is called "reprogramming" and suggests that any cell type can be turned into any other cell type given the right conditions. We will now identify the exact proteins responsible for this process of "reprogramming" using human blood cells that have lost their ability to regenerate stem cells. We aim to test the idea that turning mature blood cells into blood stem cells by reversing them into a stem cell state will allow them to regenerate the blood system once again. Since the starting cells are mature and selected from the patients' themselves, there is no worry of rejection using this innovative approach. By doing this, we believe we will uncover a process that could make human blood stem cells abundant and available to all patients.