Researchers team up for stem cell work
Researchers team up for stem cell work
Researchers in stem cell at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco and Stanford Medical School have being linked by the government-funded venture into a new national consortium team of scientists- Progenitor Cell Biology Consortium who normally work independently to discover new therapies for varied human disorders.
The Gladstone-Stanford team is seeking to develop stem cells specifically to repairs cells in damaged heart muscle while other scientists from Stanford who have linked with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is learning to reprogram the genes of adults stem cells into lines of specialized cells to treat disorders of the blood and blood vessels.
$170 million in grants come from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Other stem cell scientists have been linked in the consortium as well. According to Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, "This is an important effort to break down the barriers that have kept so many research groups working apart. It will enable scientists in all the research groups to interact much more deeply."
SF Gate-11/5/2009