Systems biology driven tissue engineering

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With an aging population, the Canadian health care system needs to develop cost effective and accurate therapeutics. Rather than treating symptoms, curing the root cause of the disease will not only allow patients to live a healthier life but also stay out of the hospital, reducing the costs to the health care system. Regenerative medicine is designed to replace diseased or damaged tissue or to induce repair in the patient by stimulating organ specific stem cells to repair the tissue. Stem cells play a central role in regenerative medicine. Bone marrow transplantation, for example, works because it replaces diseased blood stem cells with new blood stem cells. Another type of stem cell called the pluripotent stem cell can become all the cells of the body. These stem cells have recently been turned into cells of the retina and transplanted to improve the sight of patients who are going blind. In order to develop more therapies using pluripotent stem cells, we need to learn to control their development into the target cell type and prevent them from becoming cancer or other unwanted cells. My research program seeks to understand the development of pluripotent stem cells into specific lineages such as skeletal muscle, cartilage, liver, etc. Using recently developed genomic technologies and mathematical modelling, we propose to piece together maps, which are the equivalent to electrical circuits, of how genes control the differentiation of these stem cells into target cells. We propose to concentrate on understanding an early stage of differentiation the mesendoderm, which gives rise to blood, muscle, joints, bone, liver, pancreas, and other parts of the digestive system. We will then take this knowledge to differentiate mesendoderm cells further into their target tissues. Along the way, we will develop new computer programs that will help scientists in many fields to understand how genes control the function of cells.