2009 Public Lecture Series
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Stem Cells' Potential: Vive la Differentiation!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Stem cells have been used in medicine in bone marrow transplants for almost 50 years, but for most of that time doctors were unaware that stem cells were the active agent in this treatment. Human embryonic stem cells were first described in 1998, and today there are at least 12 different types of stem cells recognized. Scientists are excited about embryonic stem cells because they offer the ability to understand the basics of how a single cell can give rise to the 200-plus different cell types in the body. Clinicians are excited because of the possible therapies and diagnostics they envision arising from embryonic and somatic (or adult) stem cells. Health advocacy groups anticipate the day when stem cell-based therapies will provide treatment for themselves or their loved ones. Although embryonic stem cell research is still at an early stage, most people agree that stem cells hold great promise for the future of medicine.
Related Links
- Dolan Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Exploritorium
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- National Institutes of Health
- University of Utah, Genetic Science Learning Center
- Glossary
Matthew Kohn, Ph.D.
Dr. Kohn is a scientific officer in the NYSTEM program. He received his B.A. from Williams College and Ph.D. from Columbia University where he studied a transcription factor required for DNA replication in trophoblast lineages. Surprisingly, this ubiquitous factor was not required for embryonic development, a finding that has become quite common for other widely-expressed proteins. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Genomics of Differentiation at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health. While at the NIH, he discovered that an unrelated transcription factor was expressed in early embryos and was required for formation of the trophoblast lineages, the first differentiation process in the developing embryo. He also examined the mechanisms allowing endoreduplication, duplication of the genome without cell division, which is an unusual event in mammals. Understanding these mechanisms may provide insight into how cancer cells are able to evade normal mechanisms controlling the cell cycle. His principal research interests are stem cells of the early embryo, fate determination and specification in preimplantation mammalian embryos, and function of the trophoblast tissues.