Beckman Symposium 2003: Stem Cells, Regenerative Medicine, and Cancer

Elizabeth Blackburn is known worldwide for her work on telomeres, the structures that stabilize the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, and telomerase, which maintains telomeres. She is professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on the synthesis and functions of telomeres, and her discovery of telomere synthesis by telomerase in cells led to the finding that cell division is impaired by the actions of certain types of mutant telomerases.

Michael Clarke's research interests at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, include both the genetic control of self-renewal of normal hematopoietic stem cells and the identification and characterization of cancer stem cells. His lab has developed a technique that allows the isolation and characterization of tumorigenic and non-tumorigenic populations of cancer cells present in human breast cancer tumors, leading to more effective therapeutic strategies for breast cancer treatment. His lab also uses modern array technology to study the genes expressed by the hematopoietic stem cell, resulting in a novel method of making full-length cDNA from small numbers of cells.

Fred Gage is a leader in the field of neural regeneration and central nervous system (CNS) gene therapy. At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, Gage studies degeneration and regeneration in the adult central nervous system, with an eye on possible future treatments for everything from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson's, and Huntington’s diseases, to leukemia and lymphoma, to physical brain damage resulting from strokes or injury.

Rudolf Jaenisch is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute, professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the originators of transgenic science (gene transfer to create mouse models of human disease). His lab has produced mouse models leading to new understanding of cancers and various neurological diseases. He also has made important contributions to cloning technology.

MA Surani is a UK-based researcher with the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Institute of Cancer and Developmental Biology, University of Cambridge, whose interests include investigating the origin of the mouse germ cell lineage, and the epigenetic modifications that are unique to this lineage. The segregation of primordial germ cells (PGCs) from somatic cells is an early fundamental event during development, detailed single cell analysis of which may provide insights into the making of key cell fate decisions. A related unresolved question is that of trans-differentiation in mammals. If confirmed, it is likely that environmental factors would be involved in this phenomenon, in which case it will be important to determine how epigenetic responses can be induced by environmental cues. Experiments may show how environmental cues trigger epigenetic responses in cells. These mechanisms may have relevance to our understanding of how some cancers may be initiated by epigenetic changes in response to environmental cues.

Paul Berg is Director Emeritus of the Beckman Center and Cahill Professor Emeritus in Biochemistry at Stanford University. Among his many outstanding honors and awards is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980 for Dr. Berg's fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids with particular regard to recombinant DNA.

Margaret Fuller chairs the department of developmental biology at Stanford University. Her research concerns the mechanisms that regulate stem cell behavior. Many highly differentiated but short-lived cell-types, including blood, skin, and sperm, are produced throughout adult life from stem cells. The central characteristic of stem cells is their remarkable, long-term capacity to divide as relatively undifferentiated precursors while also producing daughter cells that initiate differentiation. Understanding the mechanisms that regulate stem cell specification and the choice between stem cell self-renewal and differentiation is crucial for realizing the potential of stem cells for regenerative medicine.

Theo Palmer is on the department of neurosurgery faculty at Stanford University where he studies stem cell biology and cell transplantation for the treatment of central nervous system injury and cancer. His major focus is on neural precursor cells, the production of new neurons, local cues that regulate precursor activity, and how this information is used to recruit cells for CNS repair or interrupt precursor signaling once it has gone awry in malignant growth.

Seung Kim leads a laboratory at Stanford University in the department of developmental biology that studies the development and function of the pancreas. His laboratory seeks to understand the mechanisms that govern pancreatic growth, cell differentiation, and physiologic function, particularly those that regulate development of insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells. His laboratory has identified methods to generate insulin producing tissues from stem cells. This may lead to better therapies for treating diabetes mellitus in humans.