Regenerative Medicine
The Transplant Centre’s Regenerative Medicine Initiative has taken on new coherence this past year, with the establishment of the SickKids Stem Cell Initiative (SSCI). The SSCI is focused on the applications of stem cells in disease and regeneration, with the ultimate goal of being the definitive international centre for stem cells in paediatric medicine.
This initiative highlights three broad-reaching areas:
- Since we now know that most of our tissues contain somatic tissue stem cells, we have made it one of our goals to “encourage the body to repair itself” by developing methods to recruit these resident stem cells. This approach is particularly relevant for SickKids, since children contain many more of these resident stem cells than do adults, and since we have internationally recognized scientific expertise in understanding how stem cells build the body during development.
- The past several years have seen a major collaboration between SickKids clinicians who treat children with genetic disorders and basic stem cell scientists. These two groups have worked together to generate human iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) from these genetically-perturbed populations. We propose to build upon this collaboration to generate relevant human cell types, such as lung or heart cells, and to thereby model human disease and ultimately screen for drugs that might rescue some of the cellular problems associated with these genetic syndromes. The Transplant Centre has already provided support for this collaboration both through its support of the Cardiac Biobank and its support of basic regenerative medicine projects.
- While the ability to generate organs from human stem cells is still “far in the future,” we can now generate cells for transplantation in a number of situations such as blood disorders. We therefore propose to make it a priority to generate cells for transplantation in disorders that are of particular relevance to SickKids’ paediatric populations.
Together, these objectives take advantage of our unique paediatric populations and clinical and scientific expertise, and will not only establish SickKids as the international leader in paediatric stem cell research, but will also make a difference to children’s health worldwide.
The SSCI part of the Transplant Centre has a broad-based membership including clinicians, clinician/scientists and basic scientists, assembled together to achieve the objectives described above. While the biographies of each of these individuals can be seen on the newly-developed SSCI website, these members are organized into groups that are interested in a particular aspect of the initiative, as follows.
The main contact person for each of the groups is indicated in italics.
- Cardiovascular stem cells: Seema Mital, Ian Scott, John Coles, Janet Rossant, James Ellis
- Lung stem cells: Christine Bear, James Ellis, Martin Post, Janet Rossant, Tom Waddell
- Blood stem cells: Yigal Dror, Eyal Grunebaum, Priscilla Chiu, Cynthia Guidos
- Neural stem cells: Freda Miller, Greg Borschel, Paul Frankland, Peter Dirks, David Kaplan, James Ellis, Norman Rosenblum, Chi-Chung Hui
- Connective tissue stem cells: Sevan Hopyan, Ben Alman, Chi-Chung Hui, Freda Miller
- Tissue engineering: Walid Farhat, Greg Borschel, Herman Yeger, Darius Bagli, Christopher Forrest, Peter Kim, Andre Bahoric, Aleksander Hinek, Sharon Cushing
- Model organism stem cells: Brent Derry, Ian Scott, Brian Ciruna, Bret Pearson, Gabrielle Boulianne, Julie Brill
- Cancer stem cells: David Kaplan, Peter Dirks, Ben Alman, Sean Egan
This is an extremely well-funded group of investigators who are publishing very high-profile papers in the area of stem cells. For examples of these publications, please see the SSCI website.
One of the exciting aspects of this particular group and members’ respective interests is that it provides us with major cross-cutting interactions with a number of the other centres and programs. For example, the Transplant Centre and the SSCI are currently organizing a symposia in collaboration with the Bone Centre, the Centre for Brain and Behaviour, the Cystic Fibrosis Centre, and the Heart Centre. We have also established a Stem Cells Journal Club that is co-sponsored by the Program in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology that is run by Dr. Brian Ciruna. These journal clubs take place every two weeks, and are very well-attended, particularly by students and postdoctoral fellows.
Overall, this has been a truly eventful year for this area within the Transplant Centre, and we are looking forward to the future as this new initiative evolves and grows to fruition.
Dr. Freda Miller
Regenerative Medicine Director, Transplant Centre