A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will use nearly $9 million in grant money to help fund a five year effort to discover the secrets of stem cells' ability to morph into all of the cell types that make up the body.
James Thomson , a UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health professor of anatomy, director of regenerative biology at the new Morgridge Institute for Research and one of the leaders of the new effort, said in a statement from the university that "pluripotency and reprogramming" is the basic theme of the grant award. "How do cells decide to exit a pluripotent state and become a certain cell type, and how, when reprogrammed, does a differentiated cell go back to a pluripotent state?"
The new Wisconsin project is one of three announced Monday by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences , one of the National Institutes of Health.
The new Wisconsin project involves an interdisciplinary team that brings together researchers from chemistry, the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, the Genome Center of Wisconsin, the Morgridge Institute for Research, and the Medical College of Wisconsin.
