My lab studies genes and mechanisms that affect blood cell formation. We produce blood cells from human-induced pluripotent stem cells, and we wanna do this more efficiently to support clinical-scale production of cell therapies that are tailored for specific patients. We use single cell genomics modalities to identify patterns in gene expression and other factors that can help support blood cell formation.
One major challenge for in vitro blood cell production is that is expensive and inefficient. We are using genetic approaches to address this. We want to use clues from human genetics and in vivo hematopoiesis to guide the improvements that we make to the in vitro system.
We're trying to use functional genomics, and single nucleus analyses to advance the field in terms of identifying genes and signaling networks that drive the formation of the right types of blood cells in vitro. Creating high quality multi-omic data set has helped us to discover transcription factors, energy, and regular machinery that drive in vitro differentiation of blood cells. We are using this data to understand human genetic data like loci, and uncertain factors that are driving differentiation that we haven't been able to see before.
We're very excited to build on insights from these multimodal data sets that we've been able to generate based on the isolation of high quality nuclei. We intend to focus our future studies on genes and developmental mechanisms that can produce blood cell types, ultimately at clinical scale in vitro.
