Grant: Emerging Team Grant: Regenerative Medicine and Nanomedicine - LOI

Enabling stem cell-targeted therapies requires understanding how to create local microenvironments, niches, that stimulate endogenous stem cells, or that serve as a platform guide the integration of transplanted stem cells and their derivatives. Although components of the in vivo niche are being described for many systems, how these components interact to modulate stem cell fate is poorly understood. The overall goals of our Emerging Team are to elucidate the mechanisms by which the stem cell niche regulates regeneration in the blood forming system, and to learn to manipulate this complex in vivo environment. Our novel interdisciplinary research will recreate and study synthetic stem cell niches using micro-scale engineering strategies, understand the structure and flow of information in stem cell niches using computational and systems biology approaches, and prospectively manipulate the in vivo blood stem cell niche using the delivery of small molecules and proteins. The new strategies to treat blood stem cell related diseases emerging from this team could dramatically impact the health and welfare of Canadians.