Stem Cell Differentiation Laboratory Researchgroup

Dendritic cells (DCs) are professional antigen presenting cells that are specialized to capture, process and present antigens to T cells in order to modulate immune response. The use of DCs to prime responses to tumor antigens provides a promising approach to cancer immunotherapy but clinically relevant responses have frequently been disappointing. Newer generation DC vaccines must build on the increased knowledge of DC differentiation including the generation of various DC subsets ex vivo. DC development is regulated by a few cytokines (Flt3L, GM-CSF, M-CSF, IL-4), thus we have limited tools to modulate the lineage specification of these cell types ex vivo. Cytokines modulate cell fate specification through the actions of transcription factors. Of note, several transcription factors have been recently identified which control the specification and development of dendritic cells. The primary research focus of our group is to generate DCs from pluripotent stem cells and modify the transcription program of these cells via perturbing the expression of lineage determining transcription factors. Our long-term goal is to control the myeloid blood cell development by transcription factor mediated cellular programming. We also intend to perform global gene expression studies to compare the expression profile of myeloid cells during the various stages of development. Moreover, we propose to perform chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq) to identify the global list of DNA binding sites of DC specific transcription factors in myeloid cells.