Irina Conboy
Assistant Professor
Bioengineering
University of California, Berkeley

With aging the capacity to regenerate new tissue can no longer keep up with tissue injury and attrition, leading to degeneration and loss of organ function. This undeniable and devastating trait of aging causes multiple pathologies, perfectly exemplified by muscle atrophy, but is poorly understood in cellular and molecular terms. Notably, we found that muscle stem cells residing in aged tissue retain their intrinsic ability to regenerate, and that aged, differentiated muscle actually inhibits the responses of these endogenous stem cells dedicated to repair and maintenance. Our current work is focused on deciphering the regeneration-specific signal transduction networks in organ stem cells, identifying age-related changes in their cross-talk and recalibrating this system back to young levels, which we hope will rejuvenate tissue repair. Work in our major research avenue uncovered that while adult stem cells are unable to deter the inhibitory affects of aged niches, human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) remarkably can neutralize the aged environment and robustly restore the regenerative responses of muscle stem cells in the old niche. Importantly, both the age-specific inhibition and the hESC-specific rejuvenation are conserved between mouse and human, allowing the use of an animal model for identifying therapeutically-relevant hESC-derived factors. Comprehensively, our group is working on deciphering gene regulatory networks that are responsible for stem cell responses, understanding age-specific changes in these networks and engineering novel synthetic curcitries and defined environments for predictable enhancement and rejuvenation of stem cell regenerative potential.