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Background 

Jiazheng Lai is from China, and finished his Bachelor’s degree in Bioscience at Jinan University and Master’s degree in Regenerative Medicine and Tissue Repair at the University of Edinburgh. He is now pursuing a PhD in Helmholtz Center Munich.

PhD project: Isolation and propagation of sweat gland stem cells for bioengineered skin

Current treatments for burn victims with extensive skin surface areas involve grafting of skin substitutes such as autologous keratinocytes or split-thickness skin autografts. While these approaches provide an epithelial barrier against bacterial/viral infection as well as a cosmetic advantage, they lack the availability of eccrine sweat glands and the thermoregulatory functions associated with the release of sweat and their evaporation from the surface of the skin.

In the project, ESR8 aims to establish a human iPSC-derived sweat gland-bearing skin organoid protocol and characterize the structure, composition and function in order to to develop approaches and a knowledge-basis that would support the future transplantations of ‘sweatable’ autologous skin.

Objectives

1. To establish a human iPSC-derived human skin organoid model.
2. To characterize the formation of sweat glands in the human skin organoid.
3. To identify the key regulatory signaling pathways that govern the formation of sweat glands.

Supervisors

• Dr. Yuval Rinkevich
• Prof. Jürgen Behr
• Dr. Markus Sperandio
• Dr. Dongsheng Jiang

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Contact: Jiazheng.Lai#helmholtz-muenchen.de

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