Baylor College of Medicine

BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE is a private medical school located in Houston, Texas, on the grounds of the Texas Medical Center. It has been consistently rated the top medical school in Texas and among the best in the United States. Its Graduate School of Biomédical Sciences is also highly rated. Baylor has become one of 63 American colleges with an endowment greater than $1 billion. In 2005 Baylor College of Medicine ranked 13th in terms of research funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and its Graduate School [Page 23]of Biomédical Sciences ranked 22nd for best Ph.D. program in the biological sciences (2007). In addition, several individual departments earn particularly heavy NIH funding, receiving several Top Ten rankings by NIH in 2005

The Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine Center (STaR Center) is housed at Baylor College of Medicine. The STaR Center focuses on three major areas of stem cell research: adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells, and cancer stem cells. Although embryonic stem cells capture most of the public's attention, the potential benefits of cancer stem cells are just as promising. The overall mission of the STaR Center is both to facilitate stem cell research of all types at Baylor College of Medicine and the clinical translation of such research into regenerative medicine.

The STaR Center was founded in 2005 and is directed by Dr. Margaret Goodell. Dr. Karen Hirs—chi serves as deputy director. The center comprises roughly 30 members overall, belonging to more than a dozen departments at Baylor, including molecular and cell biology, pediatrics, medicine, obstetrics/gynecology, and pathology. Dr. Goodell and her staff have worked with stem cell groups at Rice University, the University of Texas Health Science Center, and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in the past and expect to collaborate more in the future. Dr. Goodell specializes in adult stem cells, specifically hematopoi—etic stem cells, which reside in bone marrow and give rise to new bloods cells over the course of a person's lifetime.

Fellow founder Dr. Karen Hirschi, deputy director at STaR and a member of the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, focuses on vascular development and regeneration. Dr. Hirschi's primary interest is in understanding the events leading to blood vessel formation, as well as in elucidating regulators of vascular cell commitment and differentiation and modulators of vascular cell proliferation and migration during blood vessel assembly. Another focus of her laboratory is investigating the potential of adult and embryonic stem and progenitor cells to contribute to neovascularization in response to tissue injury and growth.

Dr. Thomas Zwaka, the third founder of the center as well as an assistant professor in the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy and department of molecular and cell biology at Baylor, focuses on embryonic stem cells. Dr. Goodell has been on the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine since 1997 and is a member of the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, as well as the Departments of Pediatrics, Molecular & Human Genetics, and Immunology. Directing a laboratory of about 20 students and postdoctoral fellows, she has performed groundbreaking work on adult—derived stem cells. She is widely recognized as a leader in the field of stem cell biology and serves on the board of the International Society for Stem Cell Research and on the Education Committee for the American Society of Hematology. She is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences, a senior editor of the journal Stem Cells, and serves on several editorial boards and as a reviewer for a multiple journals and granting agencies. She is the recipient of a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar Award, and in 2004, she received the DeBakey Award for Excellence in Research at Baylor College of Medicine.

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