Improved tools for monitoring primitive human blood development – Year two

STEMCELL Technologies is a rapidly growing Vancouver-based Canadian biotech company with more than 500
employees and annual sales of more than $80M worldwide primarily serving the burgeoning stem cell field. Blood
stem cells were one of the first type of stem cell to be identified and have been used clinically for many
transplantation applications for almost 50 years. Nevertheless, new ways of assessing specific subpopulations and
their responses to various drugs and genetic alteration are needed by clinical, basic science and pharmaceutical
investigators. Dr. Nakamichi, an MD PhD, under the joint supervision of Dr. Jiang in the Terry Fox Laboratory of the BC Cancer Agency and Dr. Szilvassy at STEMCELL will develop and validate new reagents for assessing the growth of
normal and leukemic human blood cell precursors in culture and after transplantation into mice that lack an immune
system to enable reliable use of these approaches by non-specialists.

Faculty Supervisor:

Xiaoyan Jiang

Student:

Partner:

STEMCELL Technologies Canada Inc

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology; Biotechnology

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program: