The Russ Lab

Research Overview

The emphasis of the Russ lab is on developing innovative regenerative medicine approaches. His lab employs state of the art human pluripotent stem cell technology and primary human cell/tissue culture in conjugation with genome engineering approaches to model and treat patients. The Russ lab has successfully worked on different aspects of translational research, which led to several original and important contributions to the fields of pancreatic beta-, thymus-, motor neuron- and pluripotent stem cell- biology. His team was among the first to generate functional insulin producing beta-like cells from pluripotent stem cells, an advance that has catalyzed first clinical trials using such cells in selected Type 1diabetes patients. His lab was also the first to generate functional stem cell derived thymic organoids, with the ability to educate developing human isogenic T cells.  Dr.Russ’s long term goal is to understand human immune tolerance mechanism, why T1D develops, translate novel intervention and treatment modalities and train and enable the next generation of scientists focused on regenerative medicine strategies.

what we are doing in our lab

Research Focus Areas

• Human immune tolerance Autoimmunity
• Type 1 Diabetes
• Pancreatic beta cell generation, function and maturation
• Thymus biology RNA localization and translation
• Cell Replacement therapy
• Humanized mouse models

what you would learn in our lab

Research Tools & Skills

• Pluripotent stem cell culture
• Genome engineering using TALEN and CRISPR/Cas9 technology
• Human primary tissue and cell culture
• Reprogramming of somatic cells to iPSC
Direct differentiation into functional cell types
• Ribosomal profiling of the translatome in health and disease
• TCR-Peptide-HLA matched human immune beta cell co-culture in vitro and in vivo
• Novel humanized mouse models and transplantation studies
• Plan, execute and interpret rigorous experiments
• Grant writing and scientific communication
Paper reviewing and writing

current & up to date publications

Recent Publications

Check out the recent publications from the Primary Investigator (PI), Dr. Holger Russ