AIBN Seminar Series: Modelling human macrophages using pluripotent stem cells

We are pleased to present Professor Christine Wells to speak on using pluripotent stem cells to model human macrophanges.

Date: Thursday, 21 October

Time: 12 - 1pm

Venue: Online Via Zoom

Click here to access the free seminar.

Abstract

Pluripotent stem cells can be made by reprogramming adult donor cells to an embryo-like state. These are then able to be used as a template to model human tissues in a laboratory dish. An outstanding question for the field is how similar the laboratory-derived cells are to their in vivo counterparts. The Stemformatics has developed three integrated transcriptome atlases of human blood and myeloid cells to systematically compare freshly isolated tissue-resident, cultured, and laboratory-grown models of myeloid biology. Human macrophages and dendritic cells are important clinical targets in a range of diseases, including cancer, infection, inflammation and regenerative medicine. Here I describe application of the Stemformatics atlas to benchmark, and improve laboratory derivation methods of macrophage and DC subsets.

Presenter: Professor Christine Wells, Head of Laboratory, Wells laboratory, The University of Melbourne

Professor Wells graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the University of New England in 1988. She gained experience in stem cell sciences, genetics and genomics at various positions in Australia and at the UK Medical Research Council, MRC Harwell before undertaking postgraduate studies at The University of Queensland. She gained a Doctor of Philosophy in 2004. Over the past decade she has worked at Griffith University, The University of Glasgow and The University of Queensland, developing a program of research in genomics and bioinformatics, and the application of these to better understanding of stem cell biology, tissue injury and repair. She leads a program of research that encompasses three pillars of impact and output: (1) the development and direction of community-focused collaboration platforms to enable adoption of omic data by clinicians and stem cell biologists. (2) Method development in the integration, analysis and visualisation of genomic datasets and (3) strategic application to projects that enable gene discovery and characterisation in both stem cell biology and innate immunity. Her laboratory works to the principle of biological insight through data accessibility and reproducibility and a founding ethos of her laboratory is collaboration.