Stem cell therapy has a lot of potential for Parkinson’s patients and the scientists that study it. One of our very own CIRM scholars, Maroof Adil, is making it his mission to develop stem cell based therapies to treat brain degenerating diseases like Parkinson’s.

Maroof got his undergraduate degrees from MIT in both Chemical Engineering and Biology, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. As a graduate student, he dived into the world of cancer research and explored ways of delivering cancer-killing genes specifically to cancer cells in the body while leaving healthy tissues in the body unharmed.

While he enjoyed his time spent on cancer research, he realized his main interest was to apply his skills in chemical engineering and materials science to understand biological problems. This brought him to his current position as a postdoc at UC Berkeley in the Schaffer lab.

Maroof is doing some pretty cutting edge research to develop 3D biomaterials that will vastly improve the transplantation and survival of stem cell derived neurons (nerve cells) in the brain. Check out our exclusive interview with this talented scientist below!

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Q: What are you working on and why?

MA: I have always been excited about finding engineering solutions to medically relevant problems. I decided to do a postdoc at UC Berkeley in David Schaffer’s lab because I wanted to combine chemical and materials engineering skills from my graduate research with stem cell technologies to solve biological problems. One of the exciting parts of Dave’s lab, and a reason why I joined, is that he is working on translational stem cell-based regenerative therapies for central nervous system diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s.

My current research is motivated by the need to find better therapies for these neurodegenerative diseases. While stem cell-based regenerative medicine is an up-and-coming field, there are still a lot of challenges that need to be addressed before stem cells can be successfully used in the clinic. There are three main challenges that are most relevant to my research. First, we need to improve the efficiency of stem cell differentiation, i.e. how well we can convert these stem cells to the mature, functional neurons that we need to treat neurodegenerative diseases. Second, after implanting these cells into the body, we need to increase their survival efficiency. This is because one of the main issues with stem cell-based transplants right now is that after implantation, most of these cells die. Given these first two challenges, we need to generate a lot of cells in order to effectively treat degenerative diseases. The third challenge is to make good quality, functional, transplantable cells in a large-scale fashion.

So given my chemical and materials engineering background, I wanted to see if we could use biologically inspired materials (biomaterials) to address some of these issues with stem cell differentiation and transplantation. In brief, we are developing functionalized biomaterials, differentiating stem cells within these biomaterials into neurons, characterizing the quality of these neurons, and testing the function of these stem cell-derived neurons in animal models of disease.

A major focus of our lab is to develop 3D biomaterials to increase the efficiency of large-scale production of clinical-grade stem cells [and the mature cells that are derived from them]. Our preliminary results suggest that we can get higher numbers of better quality neurons when we differentiate and grow them in 3D biomaterials compared to when they are traditionally grown on a flat, 2D tissue culture surface. Presently, I’m trying to verify that our 3D method works in the lab. If it does, this technology could help us save a lot of time and resources in generating the type of cells we need for effective cell replacement therapies.

Stem cell derived neurons grown in 3D cultures (left) and generated on 3D biomaterials (right). Images courtesy of Maroof Adil.

Q: Your research sounds fascinating but complicated. How are you doing it?

MA: It’s certainly a multidisciplinary project, and constantly requires us to draw ideas from diverse fields including polymer chemistry, developmental biology and chemical engineering. I am very grateful to be part of a resourceful lab, to my mentors, and to have amazing, motivated people working with me. UC Berkeley provides a highly collaborative work environment. So for some of the follow-up work that further characterizes the quality of these stem cells and their mature cell derivatives, we are collaborating with other labs at UC Berkeley and at UCSF.

Q: Are you interested in applying this work to other brain diseases?

MA: Certainly. Although we are primarily working on generating stem cell-derived dopaminergic neurons, which are the major cell type that die in Parkinson’s patients, I’m also interested in applying similar biomaterials to derive other types of neurons, for instance medium spiny neurons for Huntington’s disease.

The advantage of some of the materials we are working with is their modular nature. That is, we can tune their properties so that they are useful for other applications.

Q: In your opinion what is the future of stem cells in your field? Will they bring cures?

MA: I am very hopeful given what I’m seeing right now in the scientific literature, and in clinical trials for stem cell-based therapies in general. Right now, there are several trials that are testing the benefit and safety of stem cell-based transplants in different diseases. However, right now there are no clinical trials applying stem cell-derived neurons to treat brain diseases. But I think there’s certainly a lot of promise. There are challenges that we need to address in this field, and some of these I outlined earlier. Researchers are working on finding solutions to these problems, and I think that if we find them, the chances of successfully finding cures will be higher.

Q: Tell us about your experience as a CIRM Scholar.

MA: I started as a CIRM scholar in 2014. It was really great to have a source of funding that lined up with what I was interested in, which was doing translational work in regenerative medicine.

I first began working with stem cells when I started my postdoc career, but I didn’t really have a background in this area. So being new to the stem cell field, I felt that CIRM provided the support structure that I needed. And I’m not just referring to funding. CIRM brings scientists with different scientific backgrounds together in one place, where we can learn from one another, and initiate fruitful collaborations. Being a CIRM scholar makes me feel like I’m part of a bigger community, with other scientists conducting very different, but related stem cell research.

Also, I am a big fan of the CIRM blog. I am able to learn about patients and about other researcher’s backgrounds. It helps you realize that patients and researchers are part of the same field. And I like that concept of bringing the field closer: patients towards researchers and researchers towards patients. I think that is useful to boost motivation for researchers, and to give patients a better idea of what we do.

Through CIRM, we’ve had a chance to go out into the local community and present some of our research. For example, the past two years I’ve talked to local high school students during Stem Cell Awareness Week, and that was a really great experience.  I’ve presented to other professionals before, but never to those as young as high school students.  To me, it was quite exciting to realize that these kids are very much interested in the type of work we are doing, and to feel like I was able to influence them to potentially pursue science as a career.

Q: What are your career goals?

MA: I definitely want to stay in science and solve medically relevant problems. It could be nice to be faculty at a research university and in a position to pursue my own independent ideas at the interface of biomaterials and stem cell based therapies. An industry position working towards regenerative medicine or other biologically relevant applications is also an exciting possibility. At this point, being in science is my priority.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about being a scientist?

MA: The excitement you get when your experiments work out, and the joy of making new discoveries. I also like the thrill of designing experiments that may advance the field, and the feeling that what you’re doing day-to-day is contributing to a body of knowledge that others may find useful. I find it especially rewarding to be a scientist in the medical field, working on translational projects closely related to finding cures for diseases.