Systems biology driven tissue engineering

随着人口老龄化，加拿大的医疗保健系统需要开发具有成本效益和准确的治疗方法。与其治疗症状，不如治愈疾病的根本原因，不仅可以让患者过上更健康的生活，还可以远离医院，降低医疗保健系统的成本。 再生医学旨在通过刺激器官特异性干细胞来修复组织，以替换患病或受损的组织或诱导患者的修复。干细胞在再生医学中发挥着核心作用。例如，骨髓移植之所以有效，是因为它用新的造血干细胞取代了患病的造血干细胞。另一种称为多能干细胞的干细胞可以成为身体的所有细胞。这些干细胞最近被转化为视网膜细胞，并被移植到失明患者的眼睛中。为了开发更多使用多能干细胞的疗法，我们需要学会控制它们发育成靶细胞类型，并防止它们成为癌症或其他不需要的细胞。我的研究计划旨在了解多能干细胞发展成特定的谱系，如骨骼肌，软骨，肝脏等，使用最近开发的基因组技术和数学建模，我们建议拼凑地图，这是相当于电路，基因如何控制这些干细胞分化成靶细胞。我们建议集中于了解早期的分化阶段，即中内胚层，它产生血液、肌肉、关节、骨骼、肝脏、胰腺和消化系统的其他部分。 然后，我们将利用这些知识将中内胚层细胞进一步分化为它们的靶组织。沿着这条道路，我们将开发新的计算机程序，帮助许多领域的科学家了解基因是如何控制细胞功能的。

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.