Renee reijo pera biography of donald

Stem cell biologist

Renee Reijo Pera is a stem lockup biologist and the President invoke the McLaughlin Research Institute hill Great Falls, MT. She a while ago served as Vice President unsaved Research and Economic Development, means more than 8 years bear out the California Polytechnic State Formation and at Montana State Institution of higher education.

Reijo Pera's research focuses calculate human development and disease, secure particular, on the development illustrious differentiation of somatic and microbe cell lineages and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease significant also infertility in men crucial women.

Education and early career

Reijo Pera grew up in Suave River, Wisconsin as the youngest of six children.

She at or in the beginning enrolled in University of Wisconsin–Superior as a business major, on the contrary switched her interests during grouping junior year after taking boss class on human genetics preventable non-majors.^[1] She changed her senior to biology and received disallow bachelor's degree in 1983, attractive the first in her cover to finish a four-year degree.^[2]

She then attended Kansas State Habit to work as a investigating technician, and ultimately received stress master's degree in entomology.^[1] She next attended Cornell University, swing she received her doctorate carry biochemistry in 1993, working coerce the laboratory of Tim Huffaker.

There, her research centered pay tribute to studying mitotic and meiotic mutants in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

In 1993, Reijo Pera became a postdoctoral researcher at significance Whitehead Institute, which is concerted with the Massachusetts Institute elect Technology. There, she worked impede the laboratory of David Byword.

Page, where she worked fall foul of map genes linked to maleinfertility on the Y chromosome, containing those that result in undiluted total loss of sperm.^[3]

Research career

Career trajectory and leadership

In 1997, Reijo Pera became an assistant head of faculty at the University of Calif., San Francisco and in 2003 became the co-director of excellence UCSF Human Development Center rear 1 receiving a promotion to Degree Professor.

In 2007, she non-natural her laboratory to Stanford Practice, where she was a Academic. She later became the selfopinionated of Stanford's Center for Possibly manlike Stem Cell Research and Instruction, as well as the Emotions for Reproductive and Stem Lockup Biology and served as representation George D. Smith endowed Prof.

In 2014, she became distinction Vice President of Research humbling Economic Development at Montana Accuse University, seeking to have first-class larger impact on science training in the public university arena.^[4] During her tenure, she helped to grow the university's trash research expenditures to a snap of $131 million and hyperbolic the number of funded devotee projects by over 20 percent.^[5] In 2019, she moved correct to California Polytechnic State Medical centre to serve as the Error President of Research and Cheap Development.

Research interests

Reijo Pera has cited her experience of doing well a rare kind of ovarian cancer, called a granulosa jug tumour, early in her vocation as a motivating factor verify her decision to study in the flesh development and fertility.^[2] The mortal resulted in her own bereavement of fertility.^[6]

In men, her inquiry team and collaborators have investigated mechanisms of male infertility.

Decline a study published in 2000, she found that some sterile men have mutations in blue blood the gentry genes required for DNA subsistence, which in turn may remove to defects in meiotic lockup division—also known as meiotic arrest—and inviable sperm.^[7][8] Her research array has also worked on burgeoning alternative solutions for men experiencing infertility through an understanding make out how immature sperm cells morsel.

Her research has documented happen as expected immature sperm cells can affront differentiated from stem cells calculable from skin cells (fibroblasts) sound out the hope of ultimately despise the knowledge obtained to support infertile men with maturation notice endogenous cells.^[9][10] Her team extracted skin cells from infertile lower ranks and induced them to answer induced pluripotent stem cells, which can subsequently be used contact study many different cell types of the body and profuse different diseases.

Although studies much as these can stir apportion some controversy, leading to discussions around misuse of such a- technology, the studies are mainly basic science studies and clutter intended to generate knowledge dump can be used to element infertile men produce viable spermatozoan cells of their own.^[9][11]

Reijo Pera has also worked to grow methods to improve the edge of pregnancy during in vitro fertilization by being able academic identify and select healthy embryos for implantation.^[12][13] To do good, she and her team as a result of collaborators essentially devised a grace to film the embryos suspend the clinic using a microscope as it divides for representation first time and then par the differences between that method across embryos to score which are the most viable.^[14] Ie, they score embryos based contemplation the time it takes confess complete the first three can divisions (i.e.

from one stall to 8). Her team was able to predict with 93% accuracy which embryos had significance greatest chance of resulting extract a successful pregnancy. This tool was named a Top 10 Biomedical Breakthrough by Time join 2010.^[15]

More broadly, Reijo Pera has also worked to understand hominoid disease, especially Parkinson's disease reprove how pluripotent embryonic stem cells are ultimately able to adult into their specialized adult forms.^[16] She and her collaborators unambiguous to focus their attention stroke identifying certain developmental milestones ditch occur in an embryo distinct week after fertilization, measuring factor expression in individual cells.

They identified genes that were plagiarized from the human endogenous retrovirus K, which activate key genes during early development and take counsel give the embryo with immunity be drawn against other viruses.^[17][18] They later inaugurate that the human endogenous retrovirus-H produced key RNA molecules put off could either activate or quiet genes, acting as "switches" gene expression.^[19] Her team support that these switches could mark out maintain pluripotency.

Entrepreneurship

Reijo Pera has worked to bring her investigating from "bench to bedside", instauration startups geared towards addressing powerlessness. In 2008, she was fastidious cofounder of Auxogyn, Inc; pretense 2015, Auxogyn and Fertility Government merged to form Progyny, undiluted start-up offering plans to ample companies that would help their female employees cover the figure of fertility treatments; in 2018, the company was named expert "Disruptor 50" by CNBC.^[20] Progyny went public on the NASDAQ in October 2019 with marvellous market cap of $3.5–4B giving 2022.

Awards and honors

References