Phil Horner, PhD has received a one-year, $33,000 award from the University of Washington Royalty Research Fund to study “Live Imaging of Stem Cells within a Neurogenic Niche”

This award from Royalty Research Fund through the RRF, the Office of Research, supports UW faculty seeking to establish new research programs. Two times each year, a portion of the license and royalty fees received from UW-developed intellectual property is distributed through competitive grant awards from the Royalty Research Fund (RRF). Typically, 35 to 40 awards are made each funding cycle, or 70 to 80 each year. Congratulations Dr. Horner for receiving this prestigous award for 2005.

Adult brain stem cells are directed by local regions or cells from which they are born. These regions are called instructive niches and gaining a better understanding of how niches work has become an important new directive for stem cell biologists. The ability to track an adult stem cell through its maturation into a differentiated cell has many applications including the ability to determine how stem cells interact with their local environment in the normal and diseased brain. However, there are experimental limitations to current technologies that hinder such an approach. Dissociated cell culture lacks the extracellular matrix and support present in the intact brain while histological analysis of brain tissue gives only a snapshot of the stem cell microenvironment. Dr. Horner and his associates have now developed an exciting new model that allows the tracking of granule cell neurogenesis from cell division, through differentiation in rodent slice cultures.

These experiments offer the potential for development of a crucial new technology that will speed progress toward understanding how stem cells create neurons in the adult brain. Elucidating the cellular controls of neurogenic niches in the intact and compromised CNS will have implications for injury or neurological disorders where brain cells need to be replaced. This work will use existing technologies, in combination, to study stem cells within 3-dimensional tissue slices in order to pioneer a new tool that can be used to rapidly assess the molecular and cellular controls within neurogenic niches.

Dr. Horner anticipates development of a reliable technology to follow stem cells within organotypic slice cultures will lead to additional future research. Specifically, this technology can be used to test how neurogenesis or gliogenesis is affected by injury. The preparation can be used to mimic ischemic or discrete excitotoxic lesions. The Horner Lab studies the effect of injury on stem cell fate restriction in animals of trauma and has shown that EGF-signaling can influence the fate of stem cells following ischemia. The ability to study the stem cell response to injury in an in-vitro preparation will allow him to take advantage of genetic mismatch experiments or add and subtract inhibitors of cellular pathways to interrogate the injury-related signals that accelerate proliferation and fate restriction following injury.