Craig Ceol, PhD, assistant professor of molecular medicine, has received an award from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases to fund research on cellular and molecular regulators of melanocyte regeneration using zebrafish as a model.
Melanocytes are cells responsible for both the pigmentation of zebrafish stripes and human skin and where melanoma originates.
According to Dr. Ceol, the grant will fund several components of his research, including characterizing melanocyte cells, looking for genes and pathways that regulate regenerative activity, and finding how other cell types affect regenerative activity.
“The grant will be used to characterize the cells at a single-cell level, and it does so longitudinally. We can sample the same cells over time and see what they’re doing during the entire regenerative process,” Ceol said. “There’s really been very little done on these cells because they’re hard to study in mammals because they can’t be visualized directly and are difficult to extract. With a zebrafish, we’ve created methods to take them en masse and we can characterize them in various ways, and we can image them in real time, which just can’t be done in mice or in people.”
A separate component of the research will be done in collaboration with John Harris, MD, PhD, chair and professor of dermatology, and director of the Vitiligo Clinic & Research Center at UMass Chan. Ceol and Dr. Harris will use human skin samples from vitiligo patients to identify melanocyte stem cells, using what they discovered in their work with zebrafish.
“We will try to identify the same type of regenerative cells in human skin and see if they’re active and how they’re active in vitiligo patients who are recovering pigmentation. It will really be the first time that these types of cells will be isolated and characterized,” Ceol said.
Ceol, Harris and their team will use a non-invasive technique to collect skin cells from 30 to 60 vitiligo patients over the course of the grant.
“Dr. Harris and his colleagues have established a robust vitiligo clinic that draws patients from all over the U.S. and internationally. There’s enough traffic that comes through the clinic for us to accomplish what we have set out to do,” Ceol said.
The NIH award is for $2.1 million over five years.
