Welcome to the Murphy Lab
Science at the intersection of regenerative medicine and aging
Mission & Vision
We are a group of dynamic and passionate researchers who apply innovative stem cell-based models and regenerative medicine in the emerging and rapidly advancing fields of geroscience and aging biology.
A founding and driving principal in our laboratory and Center is collegiality. We conduct science that is cutting edge, but it is fueled by collaboration, and performed with conscience as we focus on diseases that directly impact our surrounding underserved community. One of our main charges is to bring cutting edge, transformative research to the masses. In essence, we like to think that we perform ‘research with reach’ that we hope has the ability to transform the lives of everyone, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or socio-economic status.
What is aging?
Remarkably, this question is yet to be fully answered. Textbooks define aging as the time-related deterioration of the physiological functions necessary for survival and fertility. Many experts view aging simply as damage accumulation. In our laboratory, we study dynamic resilience, or the ability to respond to and recover from disease or disability. In this way, one might define aging as the loss of resilience, or perhaps loss of the fine balance between the insults we experience throughout life and a robust resiliency response.
What are iPSCs?
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are derived from the donated skin or blood cells of adults and, with the reactivation of four genes, are reprogrammed back to an embryonic stem cell-like state. Like embryonic stem cells, iPSCs can be differentiated toward any cell type in the body, but they do not require the use of embryos. IPSCs stand to revolutionize the way we study human development, model disease, and eventually, treat patients. As they are an exact match to the person from whom they are created, iPSC-based platforms allow for personalized discovery or validation of novel therapies across diverse genetic backgrounds. Moreover, the flexibility and unlimited biological material provided allows for study in multiple, aging-impacted tissues. Models of human aging and resilience to disease that allow for the testing of potential interventions are virtually non-existent. We propose to model human aging and resiliency ‘in a dish’ using flexible, iPSC-based platforms as a new framework to understand healthy aging.
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Location:
The Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM)
670 Albany St
2nd Floor
Boston
MA 02118
Boston University & Boston Medical Center