A multidisciplinary team led by James Thomson has received a $1.25 million grant for stem cell research from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles.
The grant is directed to a three-year project focusing on the nature of embryonic stem cell “pluripotency,” the capacity of the cells to proliferate in an undifferentiated state indefinitely while retaining the ability to develop into any of the cell types in the human body.
The grant will help create an infrastructure that will broadly support genetic analysis and research on human embryonic stem cell differentiation. In 1998, Thomson earned worldwide recognition for deriving and cultivating the first sustained undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells. UW-Madison, through Thomson’s work, possesses five of the embryonic stem cell lines approved for federal funding, and those cell lines will be used in the project. In addition, the maskless DNA array synthesizer, invented at UW-Madison, will manufacture the gene chips used to explore the complex molecular phenomena involved in the study.
“Inadequate federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research gives private funding in this area an exceptionally high impact, and we are very grateful for the investment that Keck is making here,” Thomson says. “This Keck funding will allow us to combine two UW innovations, human embryonic stem cells and the Maskless Array Synthesizer, to give us fundamental new insights into the human body. This grant unites expertise in engineering, bioinformatics and stem cell biology in a way that is unprecedented, and it provides a glimpse of the future of biological research.”
