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Troy Lund
Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics
University of Minnesota Medical School
USA
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My position as a clinician-scientist is to recognize “gaps” in our understanding in both basic science and clinical arenas. I employ a “bedside to bench, back to bed” approach in my work. My work is unified by the study of the biology surrounding the hematopoietic system following hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT) with a focus on rare storage disorders that affect the brain and are amendable to HCT. Each area that I focus on has both a clinical and laboratory component: gene therapy, brain engraftment, graft failure after HCT, stem cell homing, and the biology & biomarkers of metabolic storage diseases. The metabolic storage diseases I focus on are: mucopolysaccharidosis type-IH (Hurler Syndrome), adrenoleukodystrophy, metachromatic leukodystrophy, Zellweger Syndrome, and other rare disorders. In brain engraftment studies, I try to understand how the brain and marrow microenvironments play role in the recruitment of hematopoietic stem cells to the brain which is a key process in attenuation of the neurologic deterioration that accompanies many of these storage diseases after HCT. In rare metabolic diseases (MPS-1H, Hunter Syndrome ALD, MLD, etc), I run one of the largest biorepositories for rare diseases in the world. My goal with our biomarker studies is to improve our understanding of: predicting early phenotype, the role of HCT for the treatment these diseases, how these diseases dysregulate the hematopoietic system prior to HCT, and the development of biomarkers to predict outcomes in these diseases after transplant. I have been involved in several key clinical gene therapy studies in rare diseases, developed IND’s for novel therapies, and continue to evolve our HCT protocol to achieve the best outcomes.