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PROGRESS REPORTS FROM 2015 GRUBSTAKE FUND RECIPIENTS Ganna Bilousova, Ph.D., and Igor Kogut, Ph.D.,
Department of Dermatology and Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine
Ganna Bilousova, Ph.D., and Igor Kogut, Ph.D., have developed a proprietary method of producing induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS cells) that is safer than most current methods because it does not use viral vectors, and it is more efficient. This year they also developed a new cell source for iPS cell generation that is easier to obtain than fibroblasts isolated from skin biopsies. Noninvasive urine samples can now be used as a source of somatic cells for reprogramming iPS cells. Notably, Drs. Bilousova and Kogut and their team successfully generated an iPS cell line from renal epithelial cells, which were isolated from just 30 milliliters of urine.
A sign of the effectiveness and efficiency of this technology is the number of programs that have chosen to adopt their technology over the past year. The Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome at the University of Colorado at Anschutz Medical Center plans to generate a large biorepository of iPS cells from Down syndrome patients, and they have asked Drs. Bilousova and Kogut to produce patient-specific iPS cell lines for them.
Additionally, the EB iPS Cell Consortium, which is comprised of research teams from the University of Colorado, Stanford University and Columbia University and was established to develop a clinically relevant treatment strategy for patients with inherited skin blistering diseases, has also chosen this reprogramming technology as the preferred method for the production of iPS cells for clinical trials (see Research Collaboration). Finally, the iPS cell core facility at Stanford University has expressed interest in using this reprogramming technology for all of its iPS cell projects outside of the consortium.
As a way to broaden the use of this safe and efficient technology within the research community, the Gates Center is developing a new Stem Cell Biobank and Disease Modeling core that will be using this method. Several research groups on the Anschutz Medical Campus have already expressed an interest in using this core facility for the generation of iPS cell biorepositories for a variety of diseases, including epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, chronic lung diseases, type 1 diabetes and age-related macular degeneration.
Steven Dow, DVM, Ph.D., and Mary Ann DeGroote, M.D.,
Department of Clinical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, Colorado State University, in collaboration with the Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine
Steven Dow, DVM, Ph.D., and Mary Ann DeGroote, M.D., hope to improve healing of chronic drug-resistant infections in humans through the use of activated, allogeneic mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) as a new therapeutic for treatment of chronic wounds.
This past year the team created cultures of human MSCs from bone marrow of healthy human volunteers purchased from Lonza (Boston, Massachusetts). The human MSCs were successfully expanded in vitro (passaged) and then frozen at low passage for subsequent assays. These studies revealed that human MSCs exhibit high levels of spontaneous bacterial-killing activity (higher than mouse or canine MSCs against MRSA strains of S. aureus) and that much of this activity is mediated by factors secreted by MSCs. Importantly, the level of antimicrobial activity released by human MSCs appears to increase as they expand in culture, which is important from the standpoint of in vitro expansion and retention of biological activity.
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