Our interest is studying healthy human hematopoiesis across a whole lifetime from the fetus to the elderly. For example, we study the liver in the fetus and the bone marrow and peripheral blood in the adult. We think it is important to study the healthy context to help us understand what goes wrong in disease.
There are many single cell Onyx approaches that have advanced the field in recent years, but these work alongside rather than replace transplantation experiments that test the function of stem cells. By injecting blood stem and progenitor cells directly into the femur, we bypass the homing phase of intravenous injections. The cells are already in their natural environment, and therefore we often have much higher engraftment.
We want to provide a quantitative view of how blood stem cells evolve over human life, how they are affected by events such as inflammation or infections, and finally, how mutations accumulate with age, how they reshape blood stem cell function, and how this predisposes us to age-related disease.
