Abstract:
Recent work by many investigators has discovered that over the course of aging, hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) commonly undergo clonal expansion. There are many consequences of this phenomenon, ranging from bone marrow failure syndromes such as the myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML), to phenotypes outside of the blood system such as vascular disease.
Understanding the mechanisms that allow clonal HSCs to expand and cause disease will be critical for developing strategies to identify patients at high risk for adverse clinical outcomes who may benefit from pre-emptive interventions. A major limitation to such studies is the fact that clonal HSCs are often present at low frequencies and intermixed with their unmutated counterparts.
In this webinar, Stephen Chung, MD, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center will discuss his team’s efforts to overcome this limitation by identifying cell surface markers present on clonal HSCs that will allow them to prospectively purify them for further functional and molecular studies. Towards this end, Mission Bio’s Tapestri single-cell multi-omics platform has made possible the correlation of cell surface phenotype with genotype with unprecedented resolution and throughput.
Dr. Chung will present some of his team’s prior work describing cell surface markers aberrantly expressed on disease stem cells in MDS and AML, as well as some preliminary data utilizing the Mission Bio Tapestri single-cell multi-omics platform to identify novel disease stem cell associated markers.
Speaker Bio:
Stephen Chung, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Children’s Research Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He specializes in the care of patients with the myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
Dr. Chung earned his medical degree at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital followed by a medical oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), where he remained as a faculty member of the Leukemia Service for six years before joining the UT Southwestern faculty in 2018.
As a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at MSKCC, Dr. Chung’s work led to the identification of the hematopoietic stem cell as the cell of origin for hairy cell leukemia, as well as the identification of CD99 as a disease stem cell marker and therapeutic target in MDS and AML.
Dr. Chung’s research focuses on studying the molecular alterations in the hematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells that underlie the development of AML and MDS. By studying these immature blood cells, he aims to better understand what causes these diseases, as well as the mechanisms by which they sometimes become resistant to standard therapies. He is also interested in identifying novel alterations in cell surface protein expression in these diseases to identify new therapeutic targets and to develop new diagnostic tests.
