What is the Stem Cells Journal Club?
The Stem Cells Journal Club is a way to get the ‘inside scoop’ on the development of some inspirational hematology papers.
It’s an opportunity for you to take part in friendly and informal online sessions where invited speakers will share:
- Insights into their successes and failures
- Relatable, memorable, and funny anecdotes about conducting their research
- Stories about other impactful moments
Speaker
Dr. Lucrezia della Volpe, Post-Doctoral fellow, Boston Children’s Hospital, United States, will be presenting an article, “Inhibiting ferroptosis enhances ex vivo expansion of human hematopoietic stem cells".
What will be discussed
Improved ex vivo expansion of human haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) would considerably advance transplantation and genome-engineered therapies, yet existing culture methods still allow substantial HSC loss. Here we show that this attrition is driven largely by ferroptosis, a metabolically regulated, iron-dependent cell-death pathway, and that it can be blocked to augment HSC expansion.
Inhibiting ferroptosis with liproxstatin-1 or ferrostatin-1 markedly increases the expansion of cord blood and adult HSCs consistently across donors in both widely used serum-free cultures and recently reported chemically defined conditions. The expanded cells retain phenotypic and molecular stem cell identity and mediate improved durable, multilineage engraftment in xenotransplanted mice without genotoxicity or aberrant haematopoiesis.
Mechanistically, ferroptosis blockade is accompanied by upregulated ribosome biogenesis and cholesterol synthesis, increasing levels of 7-dehydrocholesterol—a potent endogenous ferroptosis inhibitor that itself promotes HSC expansion. Crucially, this approach enhances yields of therapeutically genome-modified HSCs, paving a path for clinical applications.
The article
Inhibiting ferroptosis enhances ex vivo expansion of human hematopoietic stem cells
How to register
To register for this webinar free of charge via Zoom Webinars, please fill out the registration form.