Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Over two decades of fundamental research in Parkinson’s disease led by Su-Chun Zhang, MD, PhD, professor of neuroscience and neurology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Waisman investigator, has culminated in the development of a promising stem cell-based treatment for the disease.
James Thomson helped the scientific world turn its attention to the shape-shifting stem cells that give rise to all of the building blocks of complex living organisms, from skin and bone, to hearts and blood, to neurons and brains.
Polymeric scaffolds are revolutionizing therapeutics for blinding disorders affecting the outer retina, a region anatomically and functionally defined by light-sensitive photoreceptors. Recent engineering advances have produced planar scaffolds optimized for retinal pigment epithelium monolayer delivery, which are being tested in early stage clinical trials.
The mature brain is infamously bad at repairing itself following damage like that caused by trauma or strokes, or from degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s. Stem cells, which are endlessly adaptable, have offered the promise of better neural repair. But the brain’s precisely tuned complexity has stymied the development of clinical treatments.
New research by University of Wisconsin–Madison scientists reveals how a cellular filament helps neural stem cells clear damaged and clumped proteins, an important step in eventually producing new neurons.
Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) present exciting opportunities to study disease processes in vitro. Advances in bioengineering allow us to differentiate cells in a system more relevant to their native environment in order to observe naturally occurring phenomena.
A recent story on Channel 3000 highlights the efforts by the family of Kenzi Valentyn to raise money for vision research in their daughter’s name. Waisman investigator David Gamm focuses on using stem cells to fight vision diseases, including retinitis pigmentosa. To learn more about Kenzi’s story and David Gamm’s research, please visit: ‘This can be …
It’s not a cure for Down syndrome that Dave Witte and Cristina Delgadillo want for their 5-year-old daughter. “Olivia is our daughter and we love her, and we love her because of who she is. And part of who she is, is she has Down syndrome,” Witte says. But they would be happy if stem …
Numerous protocols have been described that produce neural retina from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), many of which are based on the culture of 3D organoids. While nearly all such methods yield at least partial segments of highly mature-appearing retinal structure, variabilities exist within and between organoids that can change over a protracted time course of differentiation.
Su-Chun Zhang, a Waisman Center investigator, was the first person in the world to craft human brain cells both from human embryonic stem (ES) cells and later from induced pluripotent (iPS) cells. In a recent interview with UW-Madison, Zhang answers questions on his career in stem cell neuroscience and the challenges that stem cell research may …
