Secretariat, Alumni Association, IDAC
Date	Monday, November 7th, 2016 (16:00 – onward)
Room	Smart Aging Research Building International Conference Room
Title	Challenges to Establishing Tissue Stem Cell-based Regenerative Medicine
Speaker	Masanori Miyanishi
Affiliation	Stanford University School of Medicine
Organizer	Yasuyuki Taki (Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiology・ext 8556)
Abstract	In our fast approaching super-aging society, it would be prudent for us to prepare for an acceleration in detrimental age-related diseases. Regenerative medicine has the potential to significantly mitigate this by providing solutions to prevent or even cure these diseases. Amongst the various options to establish novel regenerative treatments, tissue stem cells have a huge potential to achieve this due to their distinct characteristics of self-renewal and multipotency. Within the group of tissue stem cells, the hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) is arguably the most applicable and versatile due to their ability to address diseases by utilizing their characteristics as blood and immune cells. However, their safe and stable clinical application has not been fully realized due in part to our incomplete understanding regarding HSC biology including purification of HSCs. To address this issue, through unbiased multi-step screening, we recently succeeded in identifying a single gene expressed exclusively in mouse HSCs and established a mouse reporter system to specifically label this critical fraction (Nature, 2016). With this, we now plan to understand the molecular mechanisms of HSC self-renewal and multipotency and establish a novel platform to treat age-related diseases utilizing this pure HSC isolation technique. This seminar will also include my PhD thesis as well as my future directions.