Konrad Hochedlinger of HSCI: a recipient of a prestigious $1.5 million NIH New Innovator Award
HSCI Principal Faculty member Konrad Hochedlinger has been named a recipient of a prestigious $1.5 million New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health.
Hochedlinger will receive the money over five years to support his highly promising work on reprogramming adult mouse, and ultimately human cells, into an embryonic stem cell-like state with the capacity to produce any kind of cells in the body.
Recent research in mice has shown that inducing the expression of four transcription factors – proteins that control the expression of other genes – can transform adult skin cells into cells with the properties of embryonic stem cells. In June 2007 Hochedlinger and colleagues published a paper in Nature demonstrating a more efficient way of generating these induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and showed that they can differentiate into several cell types, including germline cells, and be maintained in a pluripotent state.
“You can really turn back the clock from adult to embryonic” cells, said Hochedliner, whose laboratory is at the Center for Regenerative Medicine, at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has cautioned, however, that “we don’t know whether this reprogramming would work in humans; if it works, would it be the same factors, or are their different factors?” Success in humans, he said, would be “much more difficult to achieve than in mice.”
In work to be supported by the New Innovator Award, Hochedlinger’s team will investigate the specific molecular changes that accompany the generation of iPS cells and whether human cells can be reprogrammed by the expression of these identified factors. “This is a wonderful honor,” Hochedlinger said of the Award, “but more importantly, it will help make it possible to continue this promising work.”
Hochedlinger was one of nine Harvard scientists to win either New Innovator Awards or Pioneer Awards from NIH this week, of only 41 granted nationwide.
At the time Hochedlinger’s paper was published, HSCI co-director Doug Melton hailed the work, saying that his study “points the way to experiments that can be tried with human cells and represents some of the most exciting work in stem cell biology and genetic reprogramming.”
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