Brandon Walters, Ph.D.
Meet the Researcher
Brandon Walters, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Currently, Walters is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Walters has been actively investigating molecular mechanisms of diverse biological processes since the start of his graduate education.
The Research
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Conditional Reprogramming of Otic Stem Cells: Development of a Novel In-Vitro Hair Cell Line
One of the major limitations in studies of hearing loss is the inability to study the phenomenon of hearing in a petri dish (in-vitro), thereby limiting the use of tools that are essential for understanding the causes of, and treatments for, hearing loss. In addition to this obvious limitation, the use of in-vitro studies is hindered primarily by technical limitations related to the low abundance of hair cells that are responsible for our sense of hearing. Researchers have attempted to overcome the issue of insufficient cell numbers by creating cell lines that mimic the properties of human hair cells, but success of these approaches have been limited. The goal of the proposed experiments is to utilize approaches from other fields to create a cell line that will allow for infinite proliferation of low abundance cells that can be turned into hair cells when needed, thus providing a limitless supply of hair cells for the study of hearing loss.
Research area: Hair Cells; Hearing Loss
Long-term goal of research: To identify drugs that can modulate the differentiation of hair cells, focusing primarily on compounds that promote hair cell formation, which we believe, will be of therapeutic benefit to people with hearing loss. To this end, we plan to utilize high throughput screening to test hundreds of thousands of compounds for potential effects on hair cell formation. We plan to combine the hair cell line that we create with various tools for tracking the developmental state of the cell to aid our evaluation of drugs that increase the number of all viable hair cells and to potentially extend our investigation to specific subtypes of hair cells that play distinct roles in hearing loss.
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