Webinar by Sean Morrison

Sean Morrison
Hughes Medical Institute, Children’s Medical Center, Research Institute (CRI), UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, USA

Dr. Sean Morrison and his lab study the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate stem cell function and the role these mechanisms play in cancer. His lab has pioneered methods to purify stem cells from multiple tissues and identified a series of mechanisms that distinguish the self-renewal of stem cells from the proliferation of restricted progenitors. They showed that stem cell self-renewal mechanisms change over time to match the changing growth and regeneration demands of tissues during development and aging. They also identified the locations and cellular compositions of niches that maintain stem cells in adult hematopoietic tissues, discovering the Leptin Receptor expressing stromal cells that are the key source of factors for stem cell maintenance in the bone marrow. The Morrison lab has also studied the mechanisms that regulate cancer cell metastasis, discovering that melanoma metastasis is limited by oxidative stress and that rare metastasizing cells survive this stress by undergoing metabolic changes that confer oxidative stress resistance. This suggests the possibility of inhibiting cancer progression with pro-oxidant therapies that exacerbate oxidative stress in cancer cells.