Year: 2024

What keeps some immune systems youthful and effective in warding off age-related diseases? In a new paper published in Cellular & Molecular Immunology, USC Stem Cell scientist Rong Lu and her collaborators point the finger at a small subset of blood stem cells, which make an outsized contribution to maintaining either a youthful balance or…Continue Reading USC Stem Cell mouse study sheds light on the secret to maintaining a youthful immune system

Is it possible to study the production of blood and immune cells inside the bone marrow? For the first time ever, the answer is yes, thanks to a new approach pioneered by USC Stem Cell scientist Rong Lu and Caltech synthetic biologist Michael B. Elowitz, together with co-investigators Carlos Lois and Lior Pachter at Caltech….Continue Reading USC’s Rong Lu and Caltech’s Michael B. Elowitz win the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award for their new approach to study blood and immune cell production in bone marrow

Congratulations to Zachary Thomas on receiving the SCDB travel award!…Continue Reading Zachary Thomas receives the travel award from Santa Cruz Developmental Biology (SCDB)

Bowen Wang from the Lu lab and Yixuan (Ada) Huang from Peter Wang’s lab have been selected to receive the 2024 Broad Collaborative Challenge Grant for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows for their proposal “Integrating HSC transplantation and FUS-controllable CAR-T cell therapy.” Congratulations!…Continue Reading Congratulations to the winners of the Broad Collaborative Challenge Grant!

The Scientist recently featured research from the Lu Lab that was published in Science Advances, describing how coupling cell lineage tracking with molecular gene expression patterns can help decipher how gene activity influences immune cell production. Read more at https://www.the-scientist.com/using-genetic-cartography-to-map-cell-lineage-71854….Continue Reading The Scientist features Lu Lab research

Congratulations to Wade Boohar on receiving the Google Alumni Award in Quantitative Biology!…Continue Reading Wade Boohar receives the Google Alumni Award in Quantitative Biology

As people age or become ill, their immune systems can become exhausted and less capable of fighting off viruses such as the flu or COVID-19. In a new mouse study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in Science Advances, researchers from the USC Stem Cell lab of Rong Lu…Continue Reading USC Stem Cell study shows how gene activity modulates the amount of immune cell production in mice