Studer, Lorenz

Swiss-born Lorenz P. Studer is founding director of the Sloan Kettering Center for Stem Cell Biology. He is also professor of neuroscience and member of the developmental biology program and the department of neurosurgery at the Weill Cornell graduate school. Additionally, he heads the steering committee of the Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative that brings together resources of Sloan Kettering, Weill Cornell medical school, and Rockefeller University.

Studer was hospitalized for a bone infection in his teens, and at around 18, having also lost several close relatives to cancer, he decided to become a doctor. He spent two years at the University of Fribourg and four at the University of Bern. At Bern, he met Christian Spenger, a neurosurgery fellow with a belief that it might be possible to treat Parkinson’s disease in animals by implanting fetal tissue to produce healthy new cells.

Studer graduated from medical school in 1991, set up a laboratory with Spenger at Bern in a former broom closet, and with sufficient, but not abundant, funding began work. He earned his doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Bern in 1994. At Bern, in 1995, Studer and Spenger performed the first Swiss clinical trial of fetal tissue transplantation in Parkinson’s.

Then, Studer moved to the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he worked under Ronald D. McKay, becoming a pioneer in the generation of dopamine cells from precursor cells. In 1998, he was first to show that transplantation of dopamine cells created in culture could improve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in rats. After that finding, Studer demonstrated that cultured dopamine cells in nearly unlimited numbers could be created from embryonic stem cells.

Studer moved to New York City in 2000, forming his own research program at Sloan Kettering. The focus of his research was the use of stem cells in brain repair.

Studer’s lab accomplishments are many. Among them is in vitro derivation of midbrain dopamine neurons from embryonic stem cells as well as mouse and monkey cells. Additionally, he achieved directed differentiation of pluripotent stem cells toward CNS and PNS fates, the first neuron subtype-specific differentiation protocol from human embryonic stem cells, and other innovative human embryonic stem cell developments. Disease modeling is another area in which his lab innovates, as well as the development of new protocols for the generation of various types of cells. The upshot was that Studer’s lab received a NYSTEM grant to develop clinical grade dopamine neurons for treatment of Parkinson’s patients.

In 2009, Studer’s laboratory became the first to model a human disease with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in a laboratory culture dish. iPSCs also have potential to generate new tissue for transplant. If taken from the patient, the cell that becomes tissue will be genetically identical to the that of the patient and unlikely to suffer rejection. Another Studer accomplishment with iPSCs was the 2011 identification of a method for inserting genes into iPSCs safely so as to reduce the risk of activating cancer-related genes. The work helped to treat a blood disorder, thalassemia, that arose from insufficient hemoglobin production.

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