Project description:This study utilizes multi-omic biological data to perform deep immunophenotyping on the major immune cell classes in COVID-19 patients. 10X Genomics Chromium Single Cell Kits were used with Biolegend TotalSeq-C human antibodies to gather single-cell transcriptomic, surface protein, and TCR/BCR sequence information from 254 COVID-19 blood draws (a draw near diagnosis (-BL) and a draw a few days later (-AC)) and 16 healthy donors.
Project description:Diamond-Blackfan anemia (DBA) is a congenital disorder characterized by the failure of erythroid progenitor differentiation, severely curtailing red blood cell production. Because many DBA patients fail to respond to corticosteroid therapy, there is considerable need for therapeutics for this disorder. Identifying therapeutics for DBA requires circumventing the paucity of primary patient blood stem and progenitor cells. To this end, we adopted a reprogramming strategy to generate expandable hematopoietic progenitor cells from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from DBA patients. Reprogrammed DBA progenitors recapitulate defects in erythroid differentiation which were rescued by gene complementation. Unbiased chemical screens identified SMER28, a small molecule inducer of autophagy, which enhanced erythropoiesis in a range of in vitro and in vivo models of DBA. SMER28 acted through autophagy factor ATG5 to stimulate erythropoiesis and upregulate expression of globin genes. These findings present an unbiased drug screen for hematological disease using iPSCs and identify autophagy as a therapeutic pathway in DBA.