Reisner Laboratory

Research Summary

For more than 30 years, research in the Reisner Laboratory has been involved with the subject of transplantation immunology and, more specifically, with questions relating to stem cell transplantation. Through this, we've translated two major milestones into clinical achievements:

• Transplantation of haploidentical hematopoietic lectin-separated stem cells in SCID patients
• The use of ‘mega dose’ transplants in leukemia patients

More recently, major insights from our work could potentially pave the way for safe hematopoietic stem cell transplantation under reduced conditioning, as a platform for organ transplantation and cell therapy. In parallel to the major drive to improve outcome of transplants, a major aim of our studies addresses mechanisms of tolerance induction by progenitor cells in the bone marrow, and by other tolerizing cells including CD8 veto T cells and MSCs and immature dendritic cells.

During the past 15 years we also extended our interest to transplantation of stem cells from other tissues and organs (Nature Medicine 2003; PNAS 2005; PLOS Med. 2006 ; J. Am. Soc. Nephrol. 2006; PNAS 2006; PNAS 2009) .

Very recently, we described a new curative approach for lung diseases based on transplantation of fetal lung stem cells (Nature Medicine; 2015) and most recently that of adult lung stem cells (Stem Cell Translation Medicine; 2018). It's hoped that these studies will pave the way for curative transplantation in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), Cystic Fibrosis, and other lung diseases. Our major basic research studies aim to characterize the lung stem cells used in our transplantation procedure.

Learn more about current and past research in the Reisner Laboratory