Description

Presented in collaboration with Be The Match BioTherapies®

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are the apex hematopoietic cell with the potential to produce robust and lifelong production of all blood cells. Thus, understanding the details of HSC molecular biology is critical to our understanding of human health and longevity. Mechanistic insights into HSC biology could be leveraged to further improve the strategies available to maintain and expand functional HSCs in vitro. Overcoming these hurdles is critical to effectively use HSCs for off-the-shelf allogeneic HSC transplantation or gene-editing of autologous HSCs for treatments of hematological disease and malignancies. In this session, we will examine the latest molecular mechanisms discovered thus far to harness the capacity of HSCs to maintain blood cell lineage output and durable HSC self-renewal towards development of novel methods to produce unlimited HSCs in vitro for use in transfusion applications.

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss the theories of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) cycling and maintenance of stem cell self-renewal in vitro.
• Define the molecular mechanisms that contribute exhaustion of HSCs in culture conditions.
• Describe the latest advances in technologies and methods to expand functional HSCs and de novo generation of HSCs in vitro.

Speaker(s):

• Dr. Larry Luchsinger, New York Blood Center
• Dr. Shahin Rafii, MD, Weill Cornell Medicine College
• Dr. Guy Sauvageau, Université de Montréal