Associate Professor

Research Areas
Pluripotent stem cells

Research Interests

The overall goal of the Zhao laboratory is to model and treat human genetic diseases using stem cells. Stem cells have the capacity to generate identical daughter stem cells (self-renewal) and to differentiate into terminally differentiated cell types (pluripotency or multipotency), therefore serving as a powerful in vitro tool to study normal and diseased human embryo development and a potential donor tissue sourcefor cell therapy. The current research of the Zhao Laboratory is focusing on the following areas:

1.The basic biology of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs)
We are interested in understanding the underlying mechanisms that regulate self-renewal and differentiation of human and mouse and PSCs.These knowledge are critical to design novel methods to generate disease-relevant cell types for disease modeling and stem cell therapy. We are interested in the roles of microRNAs, the small non-coding RNAs critical for post-transcriptional regulation, inself-renewal, lineage differentiation, and somatic cell reprogramming of human and mouse PSCs.

2. Model human congenital diseases using pluripotent stem cells
The defects of congenital diseases usually occur during human embryo development, which is inaccessible for experimentation. Although animal models have played indispensable roles in understanding human diseases, they often fail to mimic features unique to human. Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) generated from patient cells (e.g., skinfibroblasts, peripheralblood), which carry all genetic abnormalities of the disease, serve as a novel in vitro model to recapitulate the diseased embryo development. Currently, we are modeling monogenic congenital diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis (CF) and Tay-Sachs disease (TSD) and diseases with chromosomal fragment deletions such as DiGeorge Syndrome (DGS). We also evaluate the efficacy of potential gene therapy methods using the hiPSC disease models.

3. Model human cancer using pluripotent stem cells
Brain tumors (gliomas) are incurable and are among the most fatal tumors in adult. We have established hiPSCs from primary glioma cells. We are in the process of establishing an in vitro model of gliomagenesis using the glioma cell-derived hiPSCs. We expect that this model will facilitate identification of novel drug targets and development of new therapies to treat gliomas.

Education

Graduate School
Ph.D., The University of Iowa, Iowa City

Postdoctoral Fellowship
Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Stem Cell Institute

Contact

Office
Shelby Biomedical Research Building
Room 714
1825 University Blvd.
Birmingham, AL 35294-2182

Phone
(205) 975-3414

Email
ruizhao@uab.edu