More than 50,000 people around the world receive blood stem cell transplants every year to treat leukemia and other blood disorders, making the procedure “inarguably the most successful and most widely used treatment in regenerative medicine,” says John Dick, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto.
In some cases, these transplants can be done with a patient’s own cells. But those who need donor cells to replace their damaged blood still face a significant hurdle.
“The problem is that you need a transplant match and about two-thirds of people who would benefit from a transplant don’t have a match,” says Dick, who is also a senior scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre at University Health Network (UHN).
Dick leads one of two collaborative team projects funded by U of T’s Medicine by Design initiative that are trying to overcome this critical barrier. Dick’s team, which includes more than a dozen biologists, computational scientists and engineers from seven laboratories, is taking the small number of stem cells that can be harvested from the umbilical cord and placenta when a baby is born and trying to expand them in the lab to create a plentiful supply of transplant tissue.
The project builds on Dick’s life’s work of trying to understand how blood develops and how miscues in this process lead to disease, including his ground-breaking discovery 20 years ago of cancer stem cells as the source of leukemia.
Jason Moffat, a professor of molecular genetics and a faculty member at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, leads a second Medicine by Design-funded team that is trying to grow blood from scratch in the laboratory to address the short supply of compatible donor tissue.
While the Medicine by Design teams are taking different approaches, they share a common goal: to make this life-saving regenerative medicine treatment available to more patients.
