Next Symposium

6th ISSCR Annual Meeting
June 11, 2008
8:00 a.m. - Noon
Pennsylvania Convention Center
Philadelphia, PA USA

PerkinElmer, Inc.
Molecular Characterization of hESCs and their use in High Content Screening
Room 204AB, Pennsylvannia Convention Center

The symposium will focus on culture of hESCs and methods to detect changes in the cells at the genotypic and phenotypic level. Christopher Williams from PerkinElmer will introduce the method of array CGH for detection of trisomies and other genomic abnormalities. These arrays utilize bacterial artificial chromosomes containing cloned DNA representing the human genome at 1 MB resolution. Dr. Thomas Zwaka from the Baylor College of Medicine will discuss his research with long-term culture of hESC and different methods for passaging the cells.  He will show data on the detection of trisomies in hESCs in culture.Dr. Mick Bhatia from McMaster University will discuss his research on morphological and molecular characterization of cells within the hESC cultures, indicating that there are distinct populations of cells in these cultures.  Some of these populations may represent transformed and potentially cancerous cells.Dr. Lee Rubin from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute will discuss the scale-up of hESC culture and their differentiation to motor neurons. He will show automated High Content Screening methods for hESC-derived motor neurons used in research on Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a prevalent genetic disease.

Agenda:

• Welcome and light refreshments
• Introduction of Symposia and PerkinElmer
• Williams: Array-Based Comparative Genomic Hybridization using BAC clones
• Dr. Thomas Zwaka :  Self-renewal and differentiation of embryonic stem cells
• Dr. Lee Rubin:  Neurons from ES Cells: A Better Way to Study Neurodegenerative Disease?
• Dr. Mick Bhatia:  Distinguishing normal from transformed human pluripotent cells
• Summary and conclusion of speakers

Learning Objectives:

• To make participants aware of the genotypic and phenotypic changes to hESCs that can occur in culture
• To demonstrate the utility of comparative genomic hybridization in detecting trisomies in hESCs
• To discuss morphological and functional changes in hESC cultures that may represent transformation of populations of the cells
• To show the utility of hESC cultures for generating differentiated progeny cells that can be used in screening
• To demonstrate that complex drug discovery efforts can be conducted using high content screening with hESC-derived cell cultures

The overall goals of the Symposium are to educate participants on the potential abnormalities that can arise in hESC culture; and the sophisticated tools and assays that are available for characterization of hESCs and their progeny grown in culture.

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Updated April 15, 2008