Ho Lab

Research in the lab of Ritchie Ho, PhD, aims to develop faithful models of late-onset diseases using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and in vivo animal models by understanding and recapitulating how genetic and environmental conditions causing disease in older adults interact with intrinsic cellular aging pathways. Currently, no iPSC-differentiated tissues mature past the fetal state, limiting their capacity to recapitulate decade's worth of in vivo pathological events leading to diseases in adults. This is a major challenge facing personalized and regenerative medicine. Prior work in the Ho Lab has explored how signaling and epigenetic factors regulate the transition between pluripotent, fetal and adult cellular states in both forward development and in reprogramming. Our work has demonstrated that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a late-onset neurodegenerative disease characterized by the death of motor neurons, preferentially disrupts neuronal maturation and aging gene expression networks, thereby expounding the latent nature of this devastating condition. The Ho Lab applies molecular, cell and computational biology to gauge the fidelity of iPSC and animal models to in vivo human tissue physiology. Faithful aging models will advance the development of predictive diagnostics and preventive therapies for individual patients predisposed to these diseases.