Gut-Brain and Neural Inflammation in ALS

About the Event
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We are excited to host EverythingALS Community Event: Contributions from the gut-brain axis to neural inflammation in ALS with Kevin Eggan, Ph.D.

https://hsci.harvard.edu/people/kevin...

Kevin Eggan, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, Director of Stem Cell Biology for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The Eggan Lab is committed to determining the mechanisms that cause motor neuron degeneration in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and seeks to translate their discoveries into new therapeutic options for patients.

As a young investigator in the burgeoning field of stem cell biology, Kevin Eggan has garnered international recognition for his seminal work and a number of high-profile awards for his creativity and productivity, including the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2006. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of stem cell biology and cellular reprogramming, which in turn led his group to pioneer an entirely new strategy for studying human disease.

While training, Dr. Eggan performed nuclear transfer studies that challenged preconceived notions concerning the limits of cellular plasticity (Eggan et al., 2000, 2001, 2004). His own lab then became the first to demonstrate that human somatic cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic stem (ES) cell state (Cowan et al., 2005). This demonstration that human ES cells harbored reprogramming activities has been cited as an inspiration for the discovery of factors used to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Through persistent reprogramming attempts, his lab became the first to generate patient-specific iPSCs and use them to produce the cell type that degenerated in that individual (Dimos et al., 2008).

As these patients suffered from ALS, he was inspired to explore stem cells as a renewable source of motor neurons for studying mechanisms leading to neural degeneration. These experiments were the first “stem cell models” of disease and enabled the discovery that astrocytes are important non-cell autonomous contributors to motor neuron degeneration in ALS (DiGiorgio et al., 2007 and 2008). Subsequently, Dr. Eggan’s group used this novel approach to study disorders that were intractable in rodents (Mekhoubad et al., 2012), discover new mechanisms that lead to motor neuron degeneration (Suzuki et al., 2013 Kiskinis et al., 2014), and finally to identify a candidate ALS therapeutic (Wainger et al., 2014).

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