| Recent advances in stem cell and developmental biology have great implications for treating many devastating diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, liver failure, and cancer via cell-based therapy and/or by stimulation of tissue regeneration in vivo. However, a number of obstacles must be overcome before we can fully harness their immense therapeutic potentials in mammalian regeneration. This requires a better understanding of the signaling pathways that control cell fate and an improved ability to manipulate stem cell proliferation and differentiation. Therefore we have developed various functional genomic technologies (including combinatorial technologies, genome-wide gene knock-in and knock-out technologies using arrayed cDNA and siRNA libraries, and high throughput phenotypic cell-based screens) to identify small molecules and genes that can permit precise regulation of stem cell fate in a wide variety of systems including pluripotent embryonic stem cells and adult neural stem cells. |
