Page 19 - Gates-AnnualReport-2018

Yvette Pita Frampton joined the Gates Center Advisory Board about that time. As fate would have it, she had studied piano as a child with Sackstein’s mother. She contacted Sackstein about the work of the Gates Center, and Sackstein said he would welcome further collaboration with Roop and the Center.
Sackstein is a bone marrow transplant surgeon who had a patient die after a transplant at the beginning of his career, and he began to focus on how blood stem cells know to home into bone marrow. He discovered an enzyme that decorates the surface of cells--much like a piece of Velcro— enabling the cells to leave the blood vessel and go to the bone marrow or areas of inflammation.
This was also a time when another Advisory Board member, Wag Schorr, M.D., asked Roop if it might be possible to create a therapy for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), from which his granddaughter suffers. EDS is characterized by slackened skin and hyper-mobile joints that dislocate easily. Schorr offered to help get this project off the ground.
Since then, Roop and his colleagues, Drs. Bilousova and Kogut and members of their laboratory have found what he calls “one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in my career.” The team recently induced inflammation in a mouse’s ear and then introduced green mesenchymal stem cells into the blood vessel. Using live imaging technology, the researchers watched as the green cells stopped in the red vessel of the living mouse, and then moved out into the tissue and the site of inflammation.
The implications of this data are complex, and show the possibility of giving cells systemically to kids with EB as well as for treating other diseases such as EDS and lung inflammation. Without the collaboration and helpful interventions of board members like Wag and Yvette, these discoveries might never have been made.
COLLABORATION DISTINGUISHES THE GATES CENTER WAY
Valeria Canto-Soler, Ph.D., offers similar conclusions when talking about the progress of her pioneering research into stem cells’ ability to grow new retinal material that could cure a form of macular degeneration. Since arriving at the Gates Center from Johns Hopkins University in 2017, Canto- Soler’s lab has made faster-than-expected progress toward clinical trials. The expert advice and coaching from her Gates Grubstake Fund award and other collaborations have been key to that progress, she said.
“I am a basic researcher; we are not trained for developing clinical products,” Canto-Soler explained. “We are not trained to move a basic research product through the pipeline. I’ve been extremely pleasantly surprised about the infrastructure support we have through the Gates Center and Anschutz Medical Campus and CU Innovations -- to allow a product so ambitious, curing blindness in patients with AMD, to really support it so it can move steadily toward the clinic. I couldn’t imagine a year and a half ago that today I would have been able to learn as much as I have, and feel we are really pushing forward our bench product to get it into the clinic.”
Many thanks to the following Gates Center members who made presentations at
ZOOBIQUITY, COLORADO:
Steve Dow, D.V.M., Ph.D. | Nicole Ehrhart, D.V.M. | Terry Fry, M.D. Laurie Goodrich, D.V.M., Ph.D. | Karin Payne, Ph.D. | Dennis Roop, Ph.D.
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