A team of PRiME faculty members have been awarded $3.6M by the University of Toronto’s Medicine by Design initiative which supports a portfolio of multi-disciplinary team projects focused on accelerating the field of regenerative medicine. The Team Project Award will fund research aimed at targeting bottlenecks in mesoderm differentiation for regenerative therapies. Led by PRiME Director, Shana Kelley, the 8 team members span the Faculties of Pharmacy, Medicine, Arts & Science, and Applied Science & Engineering and have a diverse range of expertise. The collaboration exemplifies the cross-disciplinary approach that PRiME hopes to foster amongst its members in order to tackle big challenges in precision medicine.
The effort will expand the possibilities of using human pluripotent stem cells for therapeutic stem cell production and the mobilization of endogenous stem cells to promote tissue repair by developing approaches to control self-renewal, differentiation and proliferation with a high level of specificity. Included in the project is the development of a new on-cell screening approach for the isolation of novel antibodies, and synthetic biology approaches for engineering therapeutic proteins. The overall goal is to identify and target a comprehensive set of proteins that modulate key signal transduction pathways active during mesoderm differentiation.
“This project has significant potential for transformative outcomes. It is the first regenerative medicine-focused effort to link iterative, high-throughput functional genomics with the development of biologic reagents with therapeutic potential, “ said Dr. Kelley. “The outputs of this effort will include high-impact basic research of significant interest to the stem cell biology community, and a series of technologies and therapeutic leads with commercial potential across a variety of disease areas.”
Led by Dr. Kelley, an expert in nanobiomedicine, the project relies on a highly multidisciplinary team with additional expertise in genomics & splicing (Ben Blencowe – Donnelly Centre), tissue architecture and microenvironment (Alison McGuigan – Chemical Engineering), signal transduction (Stephane Angers – Pharmacy), antibody development (Dev Sidhu – Donnelly Centre), microfluidics (Aaron Wheeler –Chemistry), functional genomics (Jason Moffat – Donnelly Centre), and synthetic biology (Keith Pardee –Pharmacy). Together this group will develop unique approaches and generate new solutions for the production of therapeutic stem cells and approaches to endogenous repair.
Read the full Medicine by Design announcement here.