Zhou Bo

Biography

ZHOU Bo is a Professor Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China. Research Areas: Hematopoietic stem cell niche, leukemia stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells.

Research Interest

Their laboratory studies the mechanisms that regulate stem cell self-renewal and the ways by which such mechanisms get hijacked by cancer. Our laboratory has two major research focuses: 1. The cellular identity of hematopoietic stem cell niche Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are self-renewable progenitor cells that give rise to all blood cell lineages during development and after injury. HSCs are the most clinically used adult stem cells nowadays. Every year there are thousands of patients whose lives are saved as a result of HSC transplant; however, there are thousands of more patients who could be treated more effectively if we could just get more HSCs. Despite decades of effort, we are still very limited in our ability to expand these blood-forming stem cells in culture. One possibility is that the microenvironment that supports HSC self-renewal in vivo, called stem cell niche, is also essential for their maintenance in vitro. Therefore, our research interest is to elucidate the exact cellular identity of HSC niche in vivo and to reconstruct it in vitro. 2. The physiological functions of mesenchymal stem cells Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are colony-forming unit-fibroblasts (CFU-Fs) in adult bone marrow whose primary physiological function is to generate bone, cartilage, marrow adipocytes and hematopoiesis-supportive niche. Following intravenous infusion, culture-expanded MSCs are able to home to injured tissue and facilitate tissue repair, likely through immunomodulation and/or cell replacement. Because of these properties, MSCs are the focus of hundreds of clinical trials, targeting not only skeletal diseases but also diseases beyond skeleton, such as diabetes, stroke and all types of fibrotic diseases. However, these putative therapeutic effects of MSCs have never been evidenced in vivo, which questions the scientific foundation for the current MSC-based therapies. Therefore, our research interest is to investigate to what extent endogenous MSCs contribute to tissue repair and regeneration in different organs.