iPSCs - State of the Science

Dr. Alexander Birbrair received his bachelor’s biomedical degree from Santa Cruz State University in Brazil. He completed his PhD in Neuroscience, in the field of stem cell biology, at the Wake Forest School of Medicine under the mentorship of Osvaldo Delbono. Then, he joined as a postdoc in stem cell biology at Paul Frenette’s laboratory at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York. In 2016, he was appointed faculty at Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, where he started his own lab. His laboratory is interested in understanding how the cellular components of different tissues function and control disease progression. His group explores the roles of specific cell populations in the tissue microenvironment by using state-of-the-art techniques. His research is funded by the Serrapilheira Institute, CNPq, CAPES, and FAPEMIG. In 2018, Alexander was elected affiliate member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), and, in 2019, he was elected member of the Global Young Academy (GYA), and in 2021, he was elected affiliate member of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). He is the Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Current Tissue Microenvironment Reports, and Associate Editor of Molecular Biotechnology. Alexander also serves in the editorial board of several other international journals: Stem Cell Reviews and Reports, Stem Cell Research, Stem Cells and Development, and Histology and Histopathology.

1. Revealing Nervous and Cardiac System Interactions by iPSC-Based Platforms 2. Human iPSC Models of Cardiac Electrophysiology and Arrhythmia 3. Human iPSCs for Modeling of Hepatobiliary Development and Drug Discovery 4. The application of iPSC-derived kidney organoids and genome editing in kidney disease modeling 5. Towards the in vitro understanding of iPSC nucleoskeletal and cytoskeletal biology, and their relevance for organoid development 6. Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Models for Mitochondrial Disorders 7. Induced Pluripotent Stem cells for Studying Genetic Autonomic Disorders 8. Applications of iPSCs in Gaucher Disease and other rare sphingolipidoses 9. Application of CRISPR/Cas system in iPSC-based disease model of hereditary deafness 10. Progress and Possibilities for Patient-Derived iPSCs and Genetically Engineered Stem Cells in Cancer Modeling and Targeted Therapies