Studying the hematopoietic developmental trajectories of how hematopoietic stem cells and their lineages are formed in human development at high single cell resolution.
Impact
An in vitro model that faithfully recapitulates human hematopoiesis would be highly impactful allowing; generation of personalized human hematopoietic stem cells and all its lineages. Allow for stem cell replacement therapies of all blood cancers with reporgrammed stem cells that specific to the individual avoiding graft versus host disease. Also allows for studying disease mechanisms of all blood lineage diseases such as different forms of blood cancers. Single cell transcriptomics of developmental hematopoiesis as a reference allows researchers to interrogate the developmental pathways and signaling involved, improving our knowledge and getting us closer to recapitulating human hematgopoeisis within a dish.
reNEW research
Completed integration of multiple human development hematopoietic lineage datasets. Compared against with in vitro hematopoietic models. Identified differences and similarities between the two. Identified signaling pathways and genes to target to better recapitulate human hematopoiesis in vitro.
Image description
Single cell UMAP projection of 600,000 human cells clustered to a specific cell identity. Different clusters represent heterogeneity within the human blood lineages during development.
Credits
Jacky Li, Andrew Elefanty’s Blood Disease Lab, MCRI