Stanford medical scientists receive stem cell funds totaling $5.7 million

Four scientists at the School of Medicine have been awarded a total of $5.7 million by the state stem cell agency.

The awards, which were announced earlier this week, were part of $37.7 million distributed to 27 investigators from nine institutions by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in the third round of the agency’s Basic Biology Awards.

The Stanford scientists, who each received $1.42 million, are:

• MICHAEL CLARKE, the Karel H. and Avice N. Beekhuis Professor in Cancer Biology, to study the role of a gene involved in the self-renewal of stem cells in Down syndrome and cancer;
• RENEE REIJO PERA, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and the director of Stanford’s Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education, to correlate time-lapse studies and single-cell molecular analysis to better understand human embryo development;
• JOSEPH WU, associate professor of cardiovascular medicine and of radiology, to use induced pluripotent stem cells to study the molecular basis of familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a leading cause of cardiac death in young people;
• JOANNA WYSOCKA, assistant professor of developmental biology and of chemical and systems biology, to study how non-coding genetic regulatory regions called enhancers rapidly switch on the expression of genes to induce stem cell differentiation.

The full announcement is on the Medical School’s news website.