GUEST LECTURE: Deepak Lamba, PhD – “Stem Cell Approaches to Fixing a Damaged Retina”

Lamba’s lab is located at UCSF’s Department of Ophthalmology since 2018 and is currently housed at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research. His lab develops technologies and in vitro methodologies for generating various retinal cell types, including retinal neurons and retinal pigment epithelium cells, from both human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells.

David Gamm, MD, PhD – Slide of the Week

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.

David Gamm, MD, PhD

Cell type-specific investigations commonly employ gene reporters or single-cell (sc) analytical techniques. However, reporter line development is arduous and generally limited to a single gene of interest, while scRNA-seq frequently yields equivocal results that preclude definitive cell identification.