ISCC News

Intestinal stem cells (ISCs) maintain and repair the intestinal epithelium. While regeneration after ISCtargeted damage is increasingly understood, injuryrepair mechanisms that direct regeneration following injuries to differentiated cells remain uncharacterized. The enteric pathogen, rotavirus, infects and damages differentiated cells while sparing all ISC populations, thus allowing the unique examination of the response of intact ISC compartments during injury-repair. Upon rotavirus i...

Differentiation of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells into Colonic Organoids via Transient Activation of BMP Signaling   Highlights   • Satb2 expression marks the presumptive large intestine in frog and mouse embryos • BMP signaling is required for SATB2 expression and activates posterior HOX genes • BMP activation directs hPSC-derived gut tube cultures into colonic organoids (HCOs) • Transplanted HCOs morphologically and molecularly resemble human colon   Click here to view entire ar...

Dynamic Reorganization of Chromatin Accessibility Signatures during Dedifferentiation of Secretory Precursors into Lgr5+ Intestinal Stem Cells   Click here to view entire article.

Nature Medicine (Advance Online Publication) Received 27 July; accepted 14 October; published online 21 November 2016   Researchers from multiple international Universities and at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center including ISCC members, James Wells and Michael Helmrath, have published a paper in Nature Medicine titled Engineered human pluripotent-stem-cell-derived intestinal tissues with a functional enteric nervous system           Click here to review the entire paper: 

Researchers at Columbia University, including ISCC member Timothy Wang, recently published a paper entitled, “Bone Stem Cells Shown to Regenerate Bone and Cartilage in Adult Mice.”  Dr. Wang said  “Our findings raise the possibility that drugs or other therapies can be developed to stimulate the production of OCR stem cells and improve the body’s ability to repair bone injury—a process that declines significantly in old age.”  Previously, Dr. Wang found an analogous stem cell in the intest...

ISCC Steering Committee member, Dr. Timothy Wang, was named the 111th President of the American Gastroenterological Association in May 2016.

The ISCC ‘s own James Dunn, was honored with prestigious the Tools and Technology Award from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine.

ISCC Co –Investigator, Mark Donowitz, M.D., discusses his interests in artificial organs and how they may help in finding a cure for debilitating diarrheal diseases in this online article featured on the blog Beyond the Dish. Dr. Donowitz’s lab at Johns Hopkins University, has developed the first step in a device he calls, “guts-on-a-chip”, using isolated human intestinal cells in order to mimic the role of the human intestine.

Susan Henning, PhD, an ISCC Principal Investigator from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 2009 through 2014, was honored by the American Gastroenterological Association as one of two recipients of their Distinguished Mentor Award for 2015.  

A new article published in Gastroenterology, “Women in Science: Hints for Success” by both a current and a former member of the ISCC gives a carefully focused, step by step guide to professional success and personal satisfaction for female scientists. Using reflections on their own experiences of mentoring over a 125 students, fellows, post docs and junior faculty, Susan J. Henning, Ph.D. and Mary K. Estes, Ph.D. have written a paper which stresses steps that could be used by any newcomer to a...