Meet the world-class researchers who are building the future of regenerative medicine. These are the people of Medicine by Design.
“My mom inspired my research career. Growing up in the Vancouver suburbs, I watched her manage her type 1 diabetes, which is caused by her immune system attacking and killing her pancreatic cells that make insulin. As an undergraduate co-op student, the answer seemed simple: if she and others are missing cells, I could just make more and put them in. I was very naïve about how complicated that is, of course. But that thinking inspired my interest in regenerative medicine and cell therapy — research to build cells that have therapeutic functions.
I lived in Vancouver until I finished my PhD. Then I moved to Toronto for a post-doctoral fellowship at the McEwen Stem Institute at the University Health Network, with Dr. Gordon Keller. Since 2014, my research has focused on endothelial cells and what makes them different in each organ. We use stem cells that we can guide to become special endothelial cells of the liver. By understanding what makes these liver endothelial cells have unique functions, we can build new treatments for disease where these functions are lost such as in liver disease, liver cancer, and hemophilia A.
I am continuing this work in as an independent researcher now in my new lab at The Ottawa Hospital. I am excited to get the Gage Lab firing on all cylinders and start testing a crazy idea or two. As an Early Career Researcher, I am also genuinely excited about still being in the lab as a “Cell Therapist,” speaking to stem cells in their own language of development to guide them to become the best functional cells they can be.
My moments of pride in my career come from of a list of very tiny accomplishments. Getting a perfect R2 of 1.00 on an assay standard curve or guessing correctly what a reviewer may think of a paper. But eventually, I am sure that my most proud moments will shift to the achievements of my trainees. I hope my impact is to guide them to help realize the potential of cell-based and cell-informed therapeutics.
We don’t exactly know where our research will go but the eventual goal is taking a vial of cells from a freezer, passing it to a colleague to give to a patient in need, and confidently telling that person that they don’t need to worry about their disease anymore. Imagine changing the tense of a disease from have to had.
Regenerative medicine has come a long way. From simple curiosity about examples where regeneration or natural healing processes occur, we are now moving into the realm of cell and tissue replacement. In the future, we may be able to replace damaged complex organs. What was once constrained to the imagination and movies is becoming possible. Regenerative medicine is not shrinking, instead it is exploding.
My biggest challenge in my work is a lack of time. The academic process takes a long time and there is seemingly never enough time for all the good questions we have, or time enough to understand the answers we already have found.
In general, I have seen that life sciences scientific research is challenged by a need to be “first” with very little recognition of the effort required to be sure that a finding is reproducible. If we want to change lives, some level of translation is needed and that will require discoveries that work every time in the hands of many not just a few. The challenge of science is repeating the work of others while they repeat yours. I still wonder how to solve both the challenges of time and reproducibility.
If I wasn’t a researcher, I would have been a physician or an engineer. Science has been a focus of mine for a long time, but if I could not discover, I would be very happy applying the concepts and ideas to help others and to create.”