Lana Zholudeva, PhD, investigates cell therapy approaches to treat neural injury and disease. Harnessing advances in cellular engineering, Zholudeva is designing specific types of pro-reparative neurons that can be transplanted into pre-clinical models of damaged nervous systems. Her team evaluates the benefits of this novel cell therapy using cutting-edge approaches including single-cell sequencing, electrophysiology, neuroanatomical tracing, and behavioral analysis. Her work on traumatic spinal cord injury has identified a specific population of neurons that are critical for promoting recovery, and may be a key cell type for breakthrough therapies.
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Current treatments for spinal cord injury are extremely limited, and are primarily focused on leveraging the plasticity that remains in neural tissue spared by injury, leaving the underlying tissue damage untreated. Zholudeva’s research seeks to address this gap by designing cell therapy approaches to repair the damaged spinal cord.
Using human induced and embryonic pluripotent stem cells, she is engineering human spinal interneurons, and testing their capacity to repair spinal cord injury. Her lab is interested in developing regenerative medicine approaches for injuries to the cervical spinal cord, which can result in paralysis and loss of respiratory control.