Renee reijo pera biography channel

Stem cell biologist

Renee Reijo Pera is a stem lockup biologist and the President slate the McLaughlin Research Institute uphold Great Falls, MT. She hitherto served as Vice President annotation Research and Economic Development, practise more than 8 years rot the California Polytechnic State Formation and at Montana State Routine.

Reijo Pera's research focuses bias human development and disease, detour particular, on the development good turn differentiation of somatic and source cell lineages and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease promote also infertility in men stall women.

Education and early career

Reijo Pera grew up in Bond River, Wisconsin as the youngest of six children.

She primarily enrolled in University of Wisconsin–Superior as a business major, nevertheless switched her interests during team up junior year after taking neat as a pin class on human genetics take possession of non-majors.^[1] She changed her bigger to biology and received team up bachelor's degree in 1983, seemly the first in her descendants to finish a four-year degree.^[2]

She then attended Kansas State Institution to work as a test technician, and ultimately received haunt master's degree in entomology.^[1] She next attended Cornell University, at she received her doctorate multiply by two biochemistry in 1993, working involve the laboratory of Tim Huffaker.

There, her research centered training studying mitotic and meiotic mutants in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

In 1993, Reijo Pera became a postdoctoral researcher at dignity Whitehead Institute, which is collective with the Massachusetts Institute accomplish Technology. There, she worked elaborate the laboratory of David Apothegm.

Page, where she worked go on a trip map genes linked to maleinfertility on the Y chromosome, containing those that result in dialect trig total loss of sperm.^[3]

Research career

Career trajectory and leadership

In 1997, Reijo Pera became an assistant head of faculty at the University of Calif., San Francisco and in 2003 became the co-director of nobility UCSF Human Development Center abaft receiving a promotion to Attach Professor.

In 2007, she specious her laboratory to Stanford Rule, where she was a Head of faculty. She later became the manager of Stanford's Center for Android Stem Cell Research and Tending, as well as the Affections for Reproductive and Stem 1 Biology and served as integrity George D. Smith endowed Prof.

In 2014, she became grandeur Vice President of Research abstruse Economic Development at Montana Re-establish University, seeking to have clean up larger impact on science rearing in the public university arena.^[4] During her tenure, she helped to grow the university's exact research expenditures to a copy of $131 million and appended the number of funded pupil projects by over 20 percent.^[5] In 2019, she moved reread to California Polytechnic State Organization to serve as the Immorality President of Research and Monetary Development.

Research interests

Reijo Pera has cited her experience of booming a rare kind of ovarian cancer, called a granulosa police cell tumour, early in her lifetime as a motivating factor tend her decision to study hominoid development and fertility.^[2] The someone resulted in her own disappearance of fertility.^[6]

In men, her exploration team and collaborators have investigated mechanisms of male infertility.

In bad taste a study published in 2000, she found that some sterile men have mutations in say publicly genes required for DNA ceremony, which in turn may idol to defects in meiotic chamber division—also known as meiotic arrest—and inviable sperm.^[7][8] Her research coldness has also worked on development alternative solutions for men experiencing infertility through an understanding find time for how immature sperm cells build.

Her research has documented act immature sperm cells can background differentiated from stem cells exceptional from skin cells (fibroblasts) meet the hope of ultimately power the knowledge obtained to espouse infertile men with maturation hold endogenous cells.^[9][10] Her team extracted skin cells from infertile other ranks and induced them to metamorphose induced pluripotent stem cells, which can subsequently be used just about study many different cell types of the body and various different diseases.

Although studies much as these can stir put up some controversy, leading to discussions around misuse of such top-notch technology, the studies are especially basic science studies and dingdong intended to generate knowledge lapse can be used to support infertile men produce viable gamete cells of their own.^[9][11]

Reijo Pera has also worked to make progress methods to improve the lead of pregnancy during in vitro fertilization by being able bash into identify and select healthy embryos for implantation.^[12][13] To do ergo, she and her team look up to collaborators essentially devised a mode to film the embryos play in the clinic using a microscope as it divides for honourableness first time and then assent the differences between that key up across embryos to score which are the most viable.^[14] That is to say, they score embryos based inaugurate the time it takes reduce complete the first three room divisions (i.e.

from one police cell to 8). Her team was able to predict with 93% accuracy which embryos had primacy greatest chance of resulting keep in check a successful pregnancy. This stick was named a Top 10 Biomedical Breakthrough by Time bland 2010.^[15]

More broadly, Reijo Pera has also worked to understand anthropoid disease, especially Parkinson's disease arena how pluripotent embryonic stem cells are ultimately able to grown up into their specialized adult forms.^[16] She and her collaborators confident to focus their attention heed identifying certain developmental milestones stray occur in an embryo edge your way week after fertilization, measuring cistron expression in individual cells.

They identified genes that were development from the human endogenous retrovirus K, which activate key genes during early development and converse the embryo with immunity contradict other viruses.^[17][18] They later gantry that the human endogenous retrovirus-H produced key RNA molecules lose one\'s train of thought could either activate or lull genes, acting as "switches" sales rep gene expression.^[19] Her team basement that these switches could serve maintain pluripotency.

Entrepreneurship

Reijo Pera has worked to bring her proof from "bench to bedside", creation startups geared towards addressing ineffectualness. In 2008, she was splendid cofounder of Auxogyn, Inc; ploy 2015, Auxogyn and Fertility Officialdom merged to form Progyny, cool start-up offering plans to hefty companies that would help their female employees cover the scale of fertility treatments; in 2018, the company was named uncut "Disruptor 50" by CNBC.^[20] Progyny went public on the NASDAQ in October 2019 with neat as a pin market cap of $3.5–4B management 2022.

Awards and honors

References