Control and Regulation of Stem Cells with Konrad Hochedlinger Interviewed by Jan Witkowski

Konrad Hochedlinger is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Principal Faculty at the... » More

Konrad Hochedlinger is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Principal Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and an Investigator at the Cancer Center and Center for Regenerative Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He received his B.Sc. in biology and his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Vienna. From 1998-1999, he worked with Erwin Wagner at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna and from 2000-2003 as a Visiting Graduate Student and Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds-Fellow with Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute/MIT. He spent another three years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Jaenisch lab. During his stay at the Whitehead Institute, he worked on nuclear transfer in mice to show that terminally differentiated lymphocytes and malignant melanoma cells remain amenable to reprogramming into a pluripotent state. Moreover, in collaboration with others, he has established the first proof-of-principle model for “therapeutic cloning” in mice. After becoming an Assistant Professor at Harvard, Dr. Hochedlinger continued work on nuclear reprogramming by focusing on a novel method that had been previously developed by Dr. Yamanaka and involves introducing defined transcription factors into somatic cells. Dr. Hochedlinger’s lab has reproduced and improved this technology and has contributed to an understanding of its mechanism. He is currently using the mouse and human system to further elucidate the mechanism of in vitro reprogramming. Dr. Hochedlinger is a Kimmel and V Scholar and has been awarded the NIH Director’s Innovator Award in 2007.

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