Pitt Researchers Net $5 Million From NIH to Explore Better Ways to Grow Cells for Regenerative Medicine
Pitt professors receive NIH Director’s High-Risk Research Awards to pursue a novel concept of growing cells on lymph nodes and also to understand how to dictate stem cell development
Regenerative
medicine researchers at the University of Pittsburgh received two grants
totaling more than $5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to
explore new methods for cultivating replacement cells from existing tissues and
organs.
A $2.9 million, five-year Transformative R01 (T-R01) grant presented to Eric
Lagasse, a professor of pathology in Pitt’s School of Medicine and a
researcher in Pitt and UPMC’s jointly operated McGowan Institute for
Regenerative Medicine, will support the development of a novel concept: using
the body’s many lymph nodes as sites for growing replacement cells for other
tissues and organs, in essence using them as bioreactors to grow cells within
the living body. Ipsita Banerjee, a professor of chemical and petroleum
engineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering and a McGowan faculty
member, received a $2.2 million, five-year New Innovator award to unravel how
embryonic stem cells develop into mature cells and possible techniques for
influencing their growth to suit specific organs.
The grants were presented as part of the 2009 NIH Director’s High-Risk Research
Awards, a cluster of five-year grants presented to researchers exploring ideas
with the potential to advance their fields and medical treatment. On Sept. 24,
the NIH announced 115 awards totaling $348 million, including 42 T-R01 Awards,
18 Pioneer Awards, and 55 New Innovator Awards for early-stage investigators.
This marks the inaugural year for the T-R01 grants—which support innovative and
high-risk projects that could profoundly impact biomedical research and medical
treatment—and also is a record year for the number of New Innovator and Pioneer
Awards bestowed. Fellow New Innovator and T-R01 recipients include researchers
from the Cleveland Clinic, Columbia University, Duke University, Harvard
University, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Massachusetts General
Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mount Sinai School of
Medicine, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Lagasse’s work focuses on lymph nodes, which are important in responses to
bacterial and viral infection and are found throughout the body. Even spread
out, the total mass of the nodes makes them a feasible place to grow liver
cells, for example, which must also be available in abundance and with ample
blood flow to provide life-sustaining hepatic function, Lagasse said. His team
will explore growing liver and other tissues in such “ectopic” sites, meaning
outside of where it would normally reside. The same principle of using lymph
nodes as a site for ectopic cell factories might work for replacing pancreas
cells that make insulin for patients with diabetes or immune system T-cells for
patients who have AIDS and other diseases of immunologic-impairment.
“Our regenerative medicine approach for healing damaged tissues and organs
might not have moved forward without this new grant concept,” Lagasse noted.
“This funding supports assessment and rapid translation from the bench to the
bedside of nontraditional treatments.”
Banerjee will investigate the process through which embryonic stem cells become
mature, organ-specific cells and how scientists can control that development.
Using a bottom-up approach, Banerjee will cultivate stem cells into pancreatic
cells, noting molecular-level information that could be integrated into
dictating cell development, such as the influence of environmental factors and
gene and protein networks.
“I want to take a completely different approach to addressing the complex
process of cell development, which will potentially advance our understanding
of regenerative medicine and stem cell bioengineering as a whole,” Banerjee
said.
Two Pitt researchers have received NIH Director’s awards in the past. In 2007,
Eva Szigethy, of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and an assistant
professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Pitt, received a New Innovators grant
to use inflammatory bowel disease as a model for investigating the interactions
between the brain, gut, and immune system in determining how adolescents cope with
chronic illness.
The following year, Barry London, a Pitt professor of medicine, was presented
with a Pioneer Award to develop new techniques to image electrical activity of
the heart and identify those at risk of sudden cardiac death.
There is always newsworthy research and events happening in the Swanson School of Engineering.
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