Harnessing developmental biology to cure type 1 diabetes
You are cordially invited to a seminar of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology Sackler Faculty of Medicine
Nadav Sharon, PhD
Assistant Professor
The lab for the study of diabetes and pancreas development
Faculty of Biology Technion
Harnessing developmental biology to cure type 1 diabetes
Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a chronic disease caused by autoimmune destruction of pancreatic beta cells. A century after the discovery of Insulin its exogenous administration remains the only widely available treatment, with the debilitating side effects in entails. A promising alternative is the transplantation of pluripotent stem cells differentiated into functional beta cells in vitro, but low efficiency of existing protocols hampers their clinical use. Improving the existing protocols requires better understanding of the embryonic processes that lead to beta cell formation, and their recapitulation in vitro. Using single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) we were able to draw a developmental map that describes the changes in gene expression that occur during endocrine differentiation – both in vivo and in vitro. We uncovered molecular pathways that regulate the balance between progenitor self-renewal and differentiation, and discovered a previously unknown morphological structure that appears during the formation of the pancreatic islets of Langerhans. Finally, we will show how methodologies from the field of developmental biology can be used to uncover the factors that trigger the immune system to launch the attack which leads to T1D.
The seminar will take place on
Sunday, March 6th, 2021 at 13:15 PM,
At Faculty of Medicine Building, Room 927
Refreshments will be served from 13:00
Host: Avraham Ashkenazi, PhD
