Jaime Imitola is a Neuroscientist, neuroimmunologist and stem cell researcher, known for his work on the impact of inflammation in the endogenous neural stem cell function and molecular programs, work that has contributed to the understanding of the neurodegeneration and the lack of repair in chronic neurological diseases including multiple sclerosis.
Video Jaime Imitola
Education
He trained as a Post-doctoral fellow at the world-renowned Center for Neurologic Diseases at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, recently renamed the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School. Here, he studied the molecular biology of neural stem cells (NSCs) and neuroimmunology. As a faculty member at Harvard University, and affiliate Faculty of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI), he established novel techniques in imaging to study immunology of neural stem cells and microglia that lead to the discovery of the mechanisms of migration of Neural stem cells in Stroke and the alteration of neural stem cells self-renewal capacity in models of Multiple sclerosis by microglia activation. Imitola is widely published in scientific journals and highly cited for his work in stem cells with a H-index of 33 and more than 5151 citations.
Maps Jaime Imitola
Academic career
In 2004, he and his colleagues demonstrated for the first time, an inflammation-dependent mechanism for the responses of NSCs to stroke. They showed that the inflammatory chemokine Stromal cell-derived factor 1 alpha released by astrocytes during stroke was responsible for the directed migration of human and mouse NSCs to areas of injury in mice, creating Injury induced stem cell niches elucidated by reporter stem cells. Both terms were coined by Imitola and Evan Y. Snyder to denote the regenerative (micro-environments) areas created after CNS damage and the ability to visualize these areas by using stem cells expressing reporter genes (i.e. LacZ).
This discovery paved the way for the study of the responses of endogenous neural stem cell migration in regeneration in other neurological diseases. The work has been extensively cited and reproduced by multiple labs, and firmly established chemokines as important modulators of migration of neural stem cells not only in CNS development but also repair.
Imitola has received multiple awards for his research in stem cells including the John N. Whitaker, MD Award for Multiple Sclerosis research
References
External links
- Harvard Stem Cell Institute
- Harvard catalyst
- Marquis
- http://archives.focus.hms.harvard.edu/2005/Jan28_2005/research_briefs.html
- http://www.brighamandwomens.org/About_BWH/publicaffairs/news/awards/Award_Honor.aspx?sub=0&PageID=1518
- http://archneur.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=781011
- http://give.brighamandwomens.org/stories/entry/ann-romney-center-work
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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