Christopher Michael Sturgeon
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Biology
Blood is not made the same way throughout life. In a mammalian embryo, blood arises in several successive waves, each separated in time and place and each producing cells with different capabilities, ending with the hematopoietic stem cell (HSC), the self-renewing cell that sustains blood for a lifetime.
- Fields
Biology
Genetics
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
hematopoiesis
hemogenic mesoderm
hemogenic endothelium
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2033
What they work on
- Define the signaling, transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms that specify each hemogenic mesoderm subset and restrict it to one blood program, aiming to improve in vitro production of progenitors including hematopoietic stem cells.
- Determine how hemogenic endothelial cells, vessel-like cells that give rise to blood, choose among different blood lineages, using human pluripotent stem cell directed differentiation with VEGF and retinoic acid signaling.
- Test the translational potential of blood lineages derived from distinct embryonic programs, such as yolk sac-like erythromyeloid progenitors versus intra-embryonic-like definitive multipotent progenitors, which differ functionally even when they share a lineage identity.
- Differentiate human pluripotent stem cells carrying a knock-in broadly neutralizing HIV antibody into transplantable pathogen-specific plasma cells, guided by single-cell transcriptional trajectories through blood, B cell and plasma cell stages.
- Run unbiased genetic and small-molecule screens to find pathways that promote or block specific steps of B cell and plasma cell differentiation from engineered pluripotent stem cells.
More about the research
Research here asks where each wave comes from, how it develops, why each is different, and whether embryonic cell types that vanish from adults could be clinically useful. Both projects use directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells, which can be coaxed step by step down developmental paths in a dish, as a controllable stand-in for the early embryo.
Why it matters
Understanding how each embryonic wave of blood formation is specified could make it possible to manufacture blood stem cells and other blood lineages from a patient's own reprogrammed cells, for transplantation and regenerative medicine without a matched donor. The engineering project targets pathogens for which no effective vaccine exists, such as HIV, by generating stem cell-derived antibody-producing plasma cells that could be transplanted as a therapy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Pamela Wenzel
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Biology
Test how interrupting mitochondrial maturation affects commitment of hemogenic endothelium (blood-forming vessel cells) to blood fate, using drugs, in vitro vessel-mimicking platforms and cardiac mutant mice.
Nancy Speck
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biology
Determine which components of the TGFβ/BMP signaling pathways must be inhibited, and at what time, to improve maturation of SMAD7-deficient pre-HSCs into HSCs, using a quantitative ex vivo culture system with mouse embryo cells.
Amjad Askary
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Genetics
Extend a CRISPR base-editor recorder, which writes signaling activity into DNA, to capture the full range of signal strengths in living tissue and to record the order and timing of two pathways at once.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
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