News & Events: Stem Cell Therapy to Treat Cardiac Disease

Mutations in Mitochondrial DNA Induced by Cell Reprogramming May Trigger Immune Response In 2006, scientists discovered a way to "reprogram" mature cells – adult skin cells, for example – into stem cells that could, in principle, give rise to any tissue or organ in the body. Many assumed it was only a matter of time until this groundbreaking technique found its way into the clinic and ushered in a regenerative medicine revolution. Because the same patient would be both the donor and the recipient of cells derived from these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), these cells [...]

Technique Prevents Transplant Rejection in the Lab, a Major Advance for Stem Cell Therapies  Human heart muscle cells derived from triple-engineered stem cells that are "invisible" to the immune system. The red is troponin, a protein that participates in cardiac muscle contraction. The blue is the cell's nucleus. Researchers hope cells like these will eventually be used to treat heart failure. Credit: Xiaomeng Hu. UC San Francisco scientists have used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system to create the first pluripotent stem cells that are functionally "invisible" to the immune system, [...]

Sonja Schrepfer, M.D., Ph.D. and Tobias Deuse, M.D. have been awarded a 4-Year $3M NIH R01 Grant to study the role of cardiomyocytes in heart repair. Dr. Schrepfer is an associate professor and director of the UCSF Transplant and Stem Cell Immunobiology (TSI) Lab. Dr. Deuse, a renowned heart surgeon, is associate professor and director of minimally-invasive cardiac surgery at UCSF and a principal investigator in the TSI lab.  The study will generate hypo-immunogenic cardiomyocytes that could be used therapeutically for regenerating tissues but are engineered to avoid rejection by patients [...]

Sonja Schrepfer, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of the UCSF Transplant and Stem Cell Immunobiology (TSI) Lab, was recently awarded a grant  by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to engineer a "Hypo-Immunogenic Cardiac Patches for Myocardial Regeneration". The funding is part of CIRM's Discovery: Inception program is for seed funding for great ideas that have the potential to impact human stem cell research, funding that will enable the researchers to test their ideas, and generate preliminary data to support for greater funding. Dr. Schrepfer proposed [...]