Stanford Pathology & ChEM-H Breach Academia: Research trainee talk seminars designed for career development within academia and the exciting and innovative biotech industry

We invite you to a unique seminar series and networking opportunity that has been designed for you. As promised, we have been hard at work, designing a seminar series focused on your career development and the wide open and exciting space at the interface of academia and biotech. This seminar series, by invitation with RSVP requested, is designed to provide a larger view of some of the most exciting developments at the interface of science and medicine, academia and biotech, and to provide an opportunity to meet with key thought leaders. We are living through an unprecedented period of exciting change in how we do science – how we go from discovery to new diagnostics, precision health approaches, and new therapeutics, Scientific leaders of the future will be well served by understanding this ecosystem, and these are individuals you may wish to know. —  Paul Mischel

Join us on May 21 as Ahmad Nabhan from UC Berkeley gives a talk on:

"De-coding and Re-coding Stem/Niche Communication in Regeneration and Fibrosis"

Ahmad Nabhan's Research Interest

Communication between stem cells and their niche (stem-niche) is foundational for the collective cellular behavior of tissue repair and regeneration. The variable capacity to repair organs across different species is often dictated by differential stem-niche communication, highlighting the vast potential of modulating this cellular crosstalk towards regenerative therapies. However, the failure of clinical trials broadly modulating stem-niche signaling pathways such as Wnt and Tgf-B due to pleiotropy-associated toxicity underscores the need for new paradigms in understanding and manipulating stem-niche signaling. His lab’s central focus is on molecularly decoding stem-niche communication to better understand tissue maintenance and, ultimately, to reprogram this crosstalk for precision therapies that enhance organ repair.

Research in his lab includes using the lung alveolar stem cell and its interaction with its stromal niche as a model to study these broad questions. Alveolar stem cells are amongst the most dangerous cells in the body and disruption of their stem cell function underlies lung adenocarcinoma, the most frequent type of lung cancer. They have developed methods to genetically engineer primary alveolar stem cells and/or their niche then recreate their in vivo interactions ex vivo. This enables a high throughput, yet physiologically relevant dissection of their communication and how this crosstalk influences downstream processes such as stem cell proliferation, differentiation and surfactant production.

UC Berkeley Profile