The LIAN PhD students, Sheila Castañeda, Luciana Isaja and Guadalupe Amin, presented the progress of their doctoral works at the ISSCR Annual Meeting 2021 (The International Society of Stem Cell Research).

Sheila’s work aimed to validate a desminopathy-patient derived iPSC line and characterize its cardiac differentiation in order to model the disease and to generate a personalized therapy. For her part, Guadalupe’s work aimed to characterize two plakoglobin knock-out iPSCs lines during cardiac differentiation to study the relevance of this desmosomal protein in cardiomyocyte development and involvement in the C/DAVD cardiomyopathy. Both studies were led by Dra. Lucia Moro, CONICET associate researcher.
Luciana is working on the generation of 2D and 3D neuronal models to study a recently reported mutation that causes Alzheimer’s disease. She hopes that her work could provide clues to improve the clinical management of this disease. For her poster presentation, she showed the derivation of neurons from the human induced pluripotent stem cell line carrying the novel PSEN1 pT119I mutation. The study was led by Dr. Leonardo Romorini, CONICET associate researcher.

The ISSCR is an annual international congress. This virtual event brought together leaders in stem cell science and regenerative medicine from across the world to connect, collaborate, and discuss the latest advances in the field, new data, and the year’s most compelling breakthroughs.