Pamela Wenzel
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Biology
Blood stem cell transplants can treat blood cancers and other blood disorders, but many patients cannot find a matched donor. Scientists have tried to make hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), the cells that produce all blood cell types, in a dish.
- Fields
Biology
Physiology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
hematopoietic stem cells
hematopoiesis
hemogenic endothelium
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2026
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine how two-phase regulation of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP), a membrane channel, across the endothelial-to-hematopoietic transition dictates acquisition of blood stem cell fate.
- Measure the metabolic and blood-forming consequences of disrupting or enhancing mPTP activity, using single-cell measurements of metabolism, mitochondrial ultrastructure and hematopoietic function.
More about the research
So far these attempts mostly produce cells that make only a few blood types and do not take hold well after transplant. In the embryo, HSCs come from specialized blood vessel lining cells called hemogenic endothelium. The lab's earlier work found that the physical force of blood flowing through vessels helps drive this process. It also found that the start of blood flow changes energy metabolism and mitochondria, the cell's power plants, in these precursor cells.
Why it matters
Patients with blood disorders and blood cancers depend on donor-matched bone marrow, mobilized blood or cord blood for stem cell transplants. Supply and quality are limited. By using cues such as shear stress from blood flow and mitochondrial remodeling, this work could lead to methods for producing scalable, customized blood stem cells with long-term, multi-lineage engraftment. These cells could serve both transplants and disease modeling.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Christopher Michael Sturgeon
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Biology
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.
Elizabeth Jonas
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience
Test whether mice carrying a low-leak mutant ATP synthase c-subunit are protected from delayed hippocampal CA1 neuron death after transient global ischemia induced by two-vessel occlusion in aged animals.
The school
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: 25 labs on PI Pages, $419M a year on research, 340 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
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