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Wilkinson Group: Blood Stem Cell Expansion and Fitness

  • MRC MHU

Haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) support blood cell production throughout life and are also used clinically in cell and gene therapies. We are studying the biology of this important stem cell population with the aim of developing new HSC-based therapies.

Research:

Multipotent and self-renewing HSCs sustain our haematopoietic systems throughout life. In the clinic, HSC transplantation therapy currently represents the only curative treatment option for numerous haematological malignancies. Additionally, HSC-based gene therapies are being developed and used to correct various hereditary blood diseases. However, while potentially curative, these HSC transplantation therapies still represent a high-risk procedure and are not available to all patients. We are aiming to improve the safety, availability, and potential applications of HSC-based therapies through developing new tools to expand and modify HSC fitness and activity ex vivo.

Towards this goal, we recently pioneered new methods to expand transplantable HSCs long-term ex vivo (Wilkinson et al., Nature 2019; Igarashi et al., Blood Advances 2023; Sakurai et al., Nature 2023) and to evaluate the consequences of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing on functional HSCs in autologous transplant models (Wilkinson et al., Nature Communications 2021; Becker et al., Cell Stem Cell 2023). We are now seeking to build on this technology to better understand the biology of HSC self-renewal and lineage commitment (Haney et a., bioRxiv 2022), and to develop novel HSC-based therapies.

 

Lab funding generously provided by:

Kay Kendall Leukaemia Fund

European Hematology Association

National Institute of Health and Care Research

John Fell Fund

MRC

 

Lab Resources:

https://www.hematopoiesiscrisprscreens.com/

https://bgwebserver2.stemcells.cam.ac.uk/Igarashi2022/

 

Lab alumni:

Hwei Minn Khoo (research assistant) - currently a PhD student at ICR London

Ethan Sip (summer undergraduate) - currently completing MBiochem at Oxford

Our team

Selected publications

More publications