Trainee Steering Committee

Article reproducedA here from theA UBC Centre for Blood Research.A There is an urgent need for curative therapies to treat kidney failure. In 2015, over 21,000 patients in Canada received dialysis to treat kidney failure. Another 2,500 patients received a kidney transplant and 215 died on the waiting list. As part of an ongoing collaboration, the laboratories of Dr. Kelly M. McNagny (UBC, CBR PI) and Dr. Benjamin S. Freedman (University of Washington) have demonstrated that human kidney organoids grown in a culture dish can accurately model kidney development and disease. This work, recently published in the journal Stem Cells (pictured),A [...]

An interdisciplinary team made of neuroscientists, neurologists, and neurosurgeons, led by Dr. Mark Tuzynski at the University of California - San Diego (UCSD, San Diego, CA), reported this past February in Nature Medicine the successful grafting of human spinal cord-derived neural progenitor cells (NPCs) into the spinal cord of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) with high level (i.e., cervical) injuries. The grafts not only survived for at least 9 months post-injury, and but also developed large numbers of axons that traveled over long distances within the injured spinal cord and were also penetrated by host axons. Fig. 1 from original article [...]