Pitt professors receive NIH Director's High-Risk Research Awards to pursue a novel concept of growing cells on lymph nodes and also to understand how to dictate stem cell development
Regenerative medicine researchers at the University of Pittsburgh received two grants totaling more than $5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore new methods for cultivating replacement cells from existing tissues and organs.
A $2.9 million, five-year Transformative R01 (T-R01) grant presented to Eric Lagasse, a professor of pathology in Pitt's School of Medicine and a researcher in Pitt and UPMC's jointly operated McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, will support the development of a novel concept: using the body's many lymph nodes as sites for growing replacement cells for other tissues and organs, in essence using them as bioreactors to grow cells within the living body. Ipsita Banerjee, a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering in Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering and a McGowan faculty member, received a $2.2 million, five-year New Innovator award to unravel how embryonic stem cells develop into mature cells and possible techniques for influencing their growth to suit specific organs.
The grants were presented as part of the 2009 NIH Director's High-Risk Research Awards, a cluster of five-year grants presented to researchers exploring ideas with the potential to advance their fields and medical treatment. On Sept. 24, the NIH announced 115 awards totaling $348 million, including 42 T-R01 Awards, 18 Pioneer Awards, and 55 New Innovator Awards for early-stage investigators. This marks the inaugural year for the T-R01 grants-which support innovative and high-risk projects that could profoundly impact biomedical research and medical treatment-and also is a record year for the number of New Innovator and Pioneer Awards bestowed. Fellow New Innovator and T-R01 recipients include researchers from the Cleveland Clinic, Columbia University, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Lagasse's work focuses on lymph nodes, which are important in responses to bacterial and viral infection and are found throughout the body. Even spread out, the total mass of the nodes makes them a feasible place to grow liver cells, for example, which must also be available in abundance and with ample blood flow to provide life-sustaining hepatic function, Lagasse said. His team will explore growing liver and other tissues in such "ectopic" sites, meaning outside of where it would normally reside. The same principle of using lymph nodes as a site for ectopic cell factories might work for replacing pancreas cells that make insulin for patients with diabetes or immune system T-cells for patients who have AIDS and other diseases of immunologic-impairment.