Johan Flygare research group: Stem cells to red blood cells

More than a billion people are anemic. One of the major contributing causes to this global health problem is failure to produce red blood cells (RBCs). Normally the body responds to a deficiency of RBCs by increasing production of the hormone erythropoietin (EPO). EPO in turn stimulates specific red blood cell progenitor cells in the bone marrow to divide and generate more mature red blood cells. Since EPO is a very powerful and specific regulator of red blood cell production it can also be used to treat many types of anemia, in particular those where the primary cause is EPO deficiency. There are however anemic patients that respond poorly to EPO treatment.

One reason a patient with anemia does not respond to EPO treatment is that there are too few red blood cell progenitors in the bone marrow. We hypothesize that it would be possible to treat these patients with new kinds of drugs that act at an earlier cell than EPO and increase production of EPO-responsive red blood cell progenitors from the hematopoietic stem cells.

Our research is therefore aimed at:

• Defining master regulators of red blood cell development.
• Understanding how self-renewal of red blood cell progenitor cells is regulated.
• Understanding the mechanism causing lack of red blood cell progenitor cells in certain groups of anemic patients (Diamond-Blackfan Anemia).
• Discovering new drugs and drug targets for treatment of anemia.

anemia treatment