Dan Kaufman, MD, PhD
Professor, Medicine
Studies in the Kaufman Lab focus on use of human pluripotent stem cells to study basic mechanisms that regulate early human blood cell development and to derive therapeutic mature blood cell populations.
These studies utilize both human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Both hESCs and iPSCs can be maintained in long-term culture with stable karyotype and without loss of the developmental potential to make all the cells and tissues in the body. Therefore hESCs/iPSCs provide an ideal platform both for studies of human hematopoiesis and large-scale production of blood cells such as lymphocytes that can be used for novel therapies against cancer and other diseases. (Angelos and Kaufman, 2015; Kaufman, 2009).