Dennis A Steindler, Professor, Executive Director
Ph.D., Neurobiology, University of California, San Francisco, 1977
Contact information:
PO Box 100015
Gainesville, FL 32610-
E-mail: steindler@mbi.ufl.edu
Work phone number: 352-392-0490
Fax number: 352-846-0185
Office Room Number: L5-101
Lab Room Number: L3-132
Research interests within the MBI-UF Programmatic Matrix: Brain Traumatic Injury, Developmental Neuro-Biology, Neural Genetics, Neuro Stem Cell Biology, Neuro-Biology of Aging/Dementia, Neuro-Cancer,
Searchable neuro-related research terms and diseases: stem cells, cell and molecular biology, neurological disease
Description of Neuro-related Research:
The major research goal of my program is to see the use of stem cell therapy become a major treatment for debilitating neurological diseases. Five different but concurrently run sets of experiments aim to advance our understanding and use of neural stem cell therapies. The five approaches are:
1) The development and refinement of new in vitro methodologies that, in part, rely on insights from studies of hematopoiesis to selectively expand particular stem or progenitor cell populations and also control their differentiation into particular types of neurons;
2) The discovery of genes involved in stem cell growth and differentiation using clonal populations of stem/progenitor cells as a model for neurogenesis, by way of creating cDNA libraries from normal and neurological disease brain;
3) Use of animal models of neurodegenerative disease by a dedicated transplant group in the lab that is refining methods of integrating grafted stem/progenitor cells into altered adult brain circuitries;
4) Stem cell plasticity and homing in a variety of tissues; and
5) Studying distinct stem/progenitor cell populations as a potential source of primary tumors.
In addition to augmenting the ex vivo expansion, and attempting to control fate and differentiation of stem/progenitor cells isolated from the postnatal and adult periventricular subependymal zone using culture methods developed in our lab that affect cell-cell and cell-substrate interactions, we also are using new molecular approaches (e.g. cDNA libraries from single stem/progenitor cell clones) to characterize novel developmental genes involved in cell genesis, survival and cell death.
The main strategy of these studies is to exploit well-known approaches for gaining access to signaling pathways that direct cell survival, proliferation, and fate determination. As these gene expression profiles are refined, future approaches can rely on stem/progenitor cells as vehicles for gene therapy in human disease. It is even possible that gene-discovery studies will lead to the development of new drugs that expand our resident, quiescent stem/progenitor cell populations within marrow and other CNS sites, and lead to their migration and differentiation within cell-deficient targets without the need for ex vivo manipulation and grafting. Finally, we have begun to exploit similar cell and molecular approaches to study cellular morphotypes and genes involved in stem/progenitor cell growth associated with brain tumors.
