Centre for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine

Every year, thousands of patients die from organ failure because there are not enough matching donors for the transplants that they need. Also, thousands of others suffer from the effects of diabetes, even though they take insulin. Existing therapies for many diseases of the brain, such as Parkinson?s and multiple sclerosis, fall far short of a cure. Stem cells could possibly provide cures for these diseases. Embryonic stem (ES) cells are derived from embryos at the earliest stages of development, when the embryo is a microscopic, hollow ball of cells. They provide a promising means for generating many or perhaps all of the 200 specialised cell types of the body. Stem cells have been detected in other body tissues, such as the bone marrow and nervous system, and these also represent potential sources of therapeutic materials. The proposed research is designed to provide the foundations in basic knowledge of stem cell biology to build the clinical treatments that are likely to emerge from a fundamental understanding of this field.

The mission of the Cambridge Centre for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine is to harness basic knowledge of cellular and developmental biology for therapy of human diseases through the use of stem cells. The Centre will accomplish this mission by fusing the University?s basic research efforts with its clinical expertise. The purpose of this union is to generate a stem cell research enterprise that not only expedites the translation of stem cell biology into clinical use, but also generates fundamental insights into mechanisms of normal development and their perturbation in birth defects and cancer. A basic aim is to understand how stem cells preserve their unique ability, known as pluripotency, to specialise into differentiated cell types. A related aim is to understand in greater depth how cells initiate differentiation into early tissue lineages and then use these insights to control the specialisation of stem cells into clinically useful cell types. Thirdly, research is proposed to understand how cells committed to specific lineages maintain their proliferative status during embryonic development and to apply this information to generate the large cell populations needed to study cell transplantation therapy for diseases in model systems. The cell types selected for study are ones in which purified cell populations are likely to affect the disease processes, the central nervous system and the endocrine pancreas. A long-term multidisciplinary approach is needed because of the complexity of cells as therapeutic reagents. The proposed Centre will unify researchers in two Cambridge faculties (School of the Biological Sciences and School of Clinical Medicine) and materially assist them in translating their research into clinical use by providing them with dedicated stem cell research resources and a mechanism for their collaborative interaction, through use of the shared facilities, seminars and a training programme.