April 13, 2022

Patients suffering from blood disorders, like blood cancers or sickle cell disease, could now have a new treatment on the horizon. Recently published, UCLA-led research provides a detailed “road map” of human blood stem cell development, that can guide scientists in creating these life-saving stem cells in a laboratory, using a patient’s own cells. These findings, published in Nature, pave the way for growing fully functional blood stem cells in the lab.

The first co-authors of this publication are: Vincenzo Calvanese, Sandra Capellera-Garcia and Feiyang Ma. The senior author is Dr. Hanna Mikkola, UCLA professor in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology–and also a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

Other UCLA Life Sciences co-authors include: Iman Fares, Sophia Ekstrand, Júlia Aguadé-Gorgorió, Anastasia Vavilina, Diane Lefaudeux, Brian Nadel, Yanling Wang, and Matteo Pellegrini.

Click here, to read the full article about this exciting discovery in today’s UCLA Newsroom.