Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
When Madison attorney David Walsh learned 17 years ago that his sons have a genetic disorder that causes blindness, he went into action mode.
A recent issue of The Why Files features stem advances at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, including several scientists at the Waisman Center.
David Tenenbaum – University Communications Developing a new drug takes enormous amounts of time, money and skill, but the bar is even higher for a promising stem-cell therapy. Many types of cells derived from these ultra-flexible parent cells are moving toward the market, but the very quality that makes stem cells so valuable also makes …
Many scientists use animals to model human diseases. Mice can be obese or display symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Rats get Alzheimer's and diabetes. But animal models are seldom perfect, and so scientists are looking at a relatively new type of stem cell, called the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPS cell), that can be grown into specialized cells that become useful models for human disease.
But the specks in the Petri dishes were the result of years of research in the laboratory of David Gamm, an ophthalmologist at the UW’s Waisman Center. And as members of the Reese family carefully cradled the dishes, they held the future of their descendants’ eyesight in their hands.
David Gamm has been selected as director of the University of Wisconsin Eye Research Institute (ERI).
For the first time, scientists at the UW-Madison have made early retina structures containing proliferating neuroretinal progenitor cells using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells derived from human blood.
Waisman Center researcher David M. Gamm, MD, PhD, has been awarded a vision research grant for “The Role of MITF in Early Retinal Fate Determination in Human Embryonic Stem Cells”.
A team of scientists from the School of Medicine and Public Health has successfully grown multiple types of retina cells from two types of stem cells — suggesting a future in which damaged retinas could be repaired by cells grown from the patient's own skin.
