The Stem Cell Podcast

Guest: Dr. Paul Frenette is the Chair and Director of the Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Frenette’s research focuses on the molecular and cellular constitutents of the stem cell niche, mechanisms of sickle cell vaso-occlusion, the role of the nervous system in cancer, and understanding...

Guest: Dr. Stephanie Willerth is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on using engineering-based approaches to stem cell biology. Her team develops bioactive scaffolds for directing stem cell differentiation, and investigates the expression of transcription factors that regulates this process. The goal of her group’s research is...

Guest: Dr. James Wells is the Director for Research in the Division of Endocrinology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, as well as the Chief Scientific Officer at the Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine ( CuSTOM ). His research focuses on understanding the embryonic development of the pancreas and gastrointestinal organs by identifying mechanisms involved in the embryonic development...

Guest: Dr. Carla Kim is a Professor in the Division of Hematology/Oncology and Pulmonary Respiratory Diseases at Children’s Hospital Boston, as well as in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and in the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Her research involves characterizing the biology of stem cells in the normal lung and in lung cancer using a combination of mouse genetics, cell biology...

Guest: Dr. Jeffrey Millman is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the  in vitro production and study of pancreatic insulin-producing β cells from human pluripotent stem cells for use in cellular replacement therapy and drug screening. He joins us to discuss his research. Resources and Links Efficient Scarl...

Guest: Dr. Sandra Ryeom is the Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Ryeom’s lab focuses on understanding the contribution of endothelial cells in different organs towards maintaining stem cell populations. She joins us to discuss her work and recent paper in Nature Communications . Resources and Links Zaps to Brain to Ease...

Guest: Dr. Karun Singh is a Principal Investigator, Associate Professor and the David Braley Chair in Human Stem Cell Research at McMaster University. The overall goal of Dr. Singh’s research program is to use stem cell-based models to study neurological disorders and devise new therapies for these conditions. His latest paper discusses an iPSC knockout resource for functional studies of autism-ri...

Guest: Dr. Pamela Robey is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research at the NIH. Dr. Robey’s work focuses on skeletal biology, and the characteristics and biological properties of bone marrow stromal cells, a subset of which are multipotent skeletal stem cells.  In late September, Dr. Robey co-authored a commentary article in Nature discussing the ever fam...

Guest: Dr. Benjamin Dekel is a leading investigator in the field of human renal stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. He is the Head of the Pediatric Stem Cell Research Institute and the Director of the Division of Pediatric Nephrology at the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital, Sheba Medical Center , Israel. Resources and Links Gene Editing Creates Mice with Two Dads – Research...

Guest: Dr. Tsvee Lapidot is a Professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His research investigates the regulation of normal and leukemic hematopoietic stem cells by the brain-bone-blood triad in transplanted mice. In this episode we talk to him about his research and his latest study in Cell Stem Cell looking at the influence of circadian rhythms on regulation of blood stem cells. Resources a...

Guest: Dr. Louis Vermeulen is a Principal Investigator at the Center for Experimental Molecular Medicine at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, and the New York Stem Cell Foundation, where he is focusing on the role of stem cells in colorectal cancer development and progression. He aims to develop improved preventative strategies and novel therapies for this disease by studying the effects o...

Guest: Dr. Kelly Frazer is the Director of the UC San Diego Institute for Genomic Medicine and Founding Chief of the Division of Genome Information Sciences in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego. Dr. Frazer has spent the past 25 years studying various aspects of functional and structural human genomics. In this episode she talks to us about her recent paper looking at the mutational burd...

Guest: Dr. Joseph C. Wu, MD, PhD is Director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and Simon H. Stertzer Endowed Professor in Department of Medicine (Cardiology) and Department of Radiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Wu is a pioneer in using iPS cells in personalized medicine and we talk to him about his work and the state of the field in respect to novel stem cell therapies for ca...

Guest: Dr. Charles Murry is the Woods Professor of Pathology, Bioengineering and Medicine/Cardiology at the University of Washington. He also serves as Director of the UW’s Heart Regeneration Program, with the goal of achieving stem cell-based heart regeneration in patients. He has recently published a paper that used stem cell derived heart cells to treat heart damage in monkeys. Featured Resourc...

Guest: Dr. David Knapp is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. Colin Hammond is a graduate student in Dr. Connie Eaves’ lab at the BC Cancer Agency. Dr. David Knapp and Colin Hammond talk about their recent publication in Nature Cell Biology regarding stem cell populations in cord blood cells. Featured Resource: Webinar: Re-Creating Disease with Kidney Organoids and CRISPR Res...

Guest: Samantha is an enthusiastic Science Communicator completing her PhD at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research focuses on brain development and stem cell biology, under the supervision of renowned scientist Dr. Derek van der Kooy. We talk with Sam about her research and also about how she embraces science communication, using it to tell her science story! Featured Resource: STEMdif...

Intro: In early 2018, STEMCELL Technologies put out a call for scientists to visit their Vancouver facilities and peer review them against their company motto of “Scientists Helping Scientists”. Out of over 300 applicants, three postdoctoral fellows were selected to form the peer review team; they visited STEMCELL in April 2018 and conducted their review over three days. In this special episode of...

Guest: Dr. Joseph Ciacci, MD, is a board-certified neurosurgeon with extensive experience in neuro-oncology of the spine and brain. Dr. Ciacci’s primary interests include tumors of the spine and brain, complex spinal reconstruction, and stereotactic radiosurgery, a form of radiation therapy that focuses high-power energy on a small area of the body. In this episode we talk to him about the results...

Guest: Dr. Benjamin Freedman is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Division of Nephrology. Dr. Freedman is currently performing biomedical research using human pluripotent stem cells to model kidney disease pathophysiology and develop new therapies. In this episode we talk about his work studying kidney disease and his latest paper in Cell Stem C...

Guest: Dr. Nicolas Rivron leads the Laboratory for Synthetic Embryology at the MERLN Institute for technology-driven regenerative medicine and at the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research. His laboratory created the blastoid system , the first model of early, pre-implantation embryos made in a dish from stem cells. Featured Resource: STEMdiff™ Trilineage Differentiati...

Guest: Peter Lengyel is the co-founder and “Beer Commander” of Kings County Beer Collective in Brooklyn, NY. Pete managed big name laboratories at Rockefeller University, UCSF and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals but after spending a huge amount of his time brewing beer first as a hobbyist, he made the leap to brewing full time. Pete started his first professional brewing enterprise in Bushwick Brooklyn...

Guest: Dr. Valeria Orlova is the Principal Investigator at the Leiden University Medical Center. Dr. Orlova’s lab uses stem cells to study the blood vessels and vasculature. She joins us to talk about her work and latest findings. Featured Resource: STEMdiff™ Trilineage Differentiation Kit – Functional Assay Kit to Assess Pluripotency by Directed Differentiation of Human ES and iPS Cells to...

Guest: Evangelos Kiskinis, PhD is an Assistant Professor in Neurology at Northwestern University.  His lab focuses on addressing fundamental aspects of the biology of human neurons in the context of physiological conditions and in the context of diseases such as ALS. Featured Resource: Madeline Lancaster on Brain Organoids: Modeling Human Brain Development in a Dish Webinar Resources and Links How...

Guest: Dr. Janet Rossant is a Senior Scientist in the Developmental & Stem Cell Biology Program at The Hospital for Sick Children and is a Professor in both the Department of Molecular Genetics and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests center on understanding the genetic control of normal and abnormal development in the early mouse em...

Guest: Dr. Nenad Bursac talks about a technology his group has developed and tested as a candidate therapy for myocardial infarction and heart failure. Dr. Nenad Bursac’s research interests include pluripotent stem cell therapies for heart and muscle disease, cardiac and skeletal muscle tissue engineering, cardiac electrophysiology and arrhythmias, genetic modifications of stem and somatic cells,...