USC STEM CELL DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS SERIES

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20 11 A.M.12 P.M.

BROAD CIRM CENTER, FIRST FLOOR SEMINAR ROOM
WEBCAST AT KECKMEDIA.USC.EDU/STEM-CELL-SEMINAR
Alysson Muotri, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Director of the Stem Cell Program
Institute for Genomic Medicine
UC San Diego

Modeling the human social brain with stem cells

The unavailability of live human brain cells for research has blocked progress toward
understanding mechanisms behind autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A human model,
using reprogrammed patient somatic cells offers an attractive alternative as it captures
a patients genome in relevant cell types. Despite current limitations, the disease in-adish approach allows progressive time-course analyses of target cells, offering a
unique opportunity to dissect cellular and molecular alterations before symptomatic
onset. Understanding current pitfalls of this model is crucial for correct data
interpretation and extrapolation of conclusions to the human brain. Innovative
strategies to collect biological material and clinical information from large patient
cohorts are important to increase the statistical power that allows extraction of
information from the noise resulting from variability introduced by reprogramming and
differentiation methods. Working with large patient cohorts is also important to
understand how brain cells derived from the diverse human genetic background
respond to specific drugs, opening the possibility of a personalized medicine for ASD. I
will present how induced pluripotent stem cells can be used to model ASD and other
social disorders, revealing new insights into the fundamental mechanism behind
human socialization.
Host: Justin Ichida, PhD.

1425 San Pablo Street, Los Angeles, CA 90033 Tel: 323-442-8080

stemcell@usc.edu