Welcome to the last Biomed Bites of 2014. We'll be continuing this series next year — check each Thursday to meet more of Stanford's most innovative biomedical researchers.
If you watch this video and aren't moved by the passion and conviction of Stanford biologist Margaret Fuller, PhD, then email me. Seriously, I'll try to talk some sense into you. Because Fuller's enthusiasm for biomedicine is downright contagious. This is a professor who you want to teach biology.
Fuller, a professor of developmental biology and of genetics, works with adult stem cells, and she's palpably gleeful about their potential to improve the health of millions.
"I was really struck and inspired by a recent article in the New York Times," Fuller says in the video above. She's talking about "Human Muscle Regenerated with Animal Help," a 2012 piece that told the story of Sgt. Ron Strang, a Marine who lost part of his quadriceps in Afghanistan. Yet here is Strang, walking, thanks to the donation of a extracellular matrix from a pig. This paper-like sheet secreted signals instructing his stem cells to come to the rescue and build new muscle. "It was amazing," Strang told the Times reporter. "Right off the bat I could do a full stride, I could bend my knee, kick it out a little bit..."
"This is really amazing," Fuller agrees. "It gives me the chills just thinking about it. This is the kind of knowledge and advances of the basic work that I do... The hope is that understanding those underlying mechanisms will allow people to design small molecules and other strategies that can be used to induce our own adult stem cells to be called into action for repair."
Learn more about Stanford Medicine’s Biomedical Innovation Initiative and about other faculty leaders who are driving biomedical innovation here.
Previously: Center for Reproductive and Stem Cell Biology receives NIH boost, Why the competition isn't adult vs. embryonic stem cells and Induced pluripotent stem cell mysteries explored by Stanford researchers
