Lorenz Studer, MD, PhD

Founding Director of the Center for Stem Biology and Enid A. Haupt Chair of the Developmental Biology Program

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Host(s): Joseph Gogos (Faculty) and Steven Kushner (Faculty)

Applications of human PSCs in modeling and treating neural disease

Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) present a powerful tool for studying human disease and for developing novel cell-based therapies in regenerative medicine. Our group has developed strategies to coax human PSCs into many specific neuron subtypes on demand and at scale. For some lineages, such as midbrain dopamine neurons, those efforts have recently translated into a first-in-human clinical trial using clinical grade, “off-the-shelf” dopamine neurons for treating patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease (PD). I will provide an update on the results from this trial and discuss some of the next steps and potential next generation products in PD cell therapy development.

I will further discuss recent progress in the lab on chemical and genetic strategies to drive neuronal maturation and aging in human PSC-derived neural cells type that enable improved modeling neural disorders including neurodegenerative disease. Similarly, new protocols enable the derivation of fast spiking PV+ cortical interneurons, a neuronal cell type that has been very difficult to generate in past studies, as PV marker expression and maturation occurs largely during postnatal development, while hPSC-derived neurons typically capture fetal stages of neural development. Using hPSC-derived PV neurons we applied this protocol to study a set of structural variants highly associated with increased risk for schizophrenia development. This study enabled us to investigate novel interneuron-mediated defects that may be linked to aspects of neuropsychiatric disease.

Please contact [email protected] with any questions.

This event will be in-person only, open to Columbia University Affiliates
Speaker Location: Jerome L. Greene Science Center, 9th Floor Lecture Hall

Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and include invited guests of the Columbia Neuroscience Seminars, the Zuckerman Institute's Local Circuits Affiliates Program, and other special seminar series through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science. 

More information and a full schedule can be found here.