Alumni

Ph.D. Students

**Alborz Karimzadeh, Ph.D** was a Ph.D. student in the Inlay lab. His main research project focused on the precursor to blood-forming stem cells in embryonic development. He successfully identified a population we called pre-HSCs, that functionally appeared to precede hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in development. He demonstrated this through cell sorting pre-HSCs based on a unique combination of surface markers, then transplanting the sorted cells into neonatal mouse recipients, demonstrating that they could give rise to bone marrow HSCs in the adult animals. Alborz graduated in 2018 and took a post-doctoral research position at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Harvard Medical School.

**Ankita Shukla, Ph.D.** was a graduate student in the Inlay lab. Her main research focus was on the developmental origins of blood-forming stem cells in embryonic development. She used a lineage tracing system to mark cells derived from extra-embryonic mesoderm (EEM) in mouse embryos, which includes the placenta and yolk sac. Her work provided evidence that some portion of adult HSCs in the bone marrow derive from extra-embryonic tissues. In addition, Ankita identified a novel marker (CD11a) to distinguish microglia in the brain from infiltrating monocyte-derived macrophages. This discovery allows the use of CD11a to distinguish between these cell types in neuroinflammation, such as in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Ankita graduated in 2019 and accepted a position as a field application scientist with Becton Dickenson (BD).

**Erika Varady, Ph.D.,** was a graduate student in the Inlay lab. Her main research focused on the effects on glucocorticoids on blood-forming stem cells and immune cells, and their impact on the safety and efficacy of engraftment after transplantation. Her work demonstrated that glucocorticoid treatment of blood stem cells increased their ability to engraft upon transplantation. Additionally, an immune cell called T lymphocytes was negatively impacted by glucocorticoid treatment, reducing it’s viability. T cells are the main cause of a complication of transplantation known as graft-versus-host disease, and her work demonstrated that by pre-treating donor cells in glucocorticoids prior to transplantation, graft-versus-host disease symptoms and severity were dramatically reduced. Erika graduated in 2021 and took a position as a research scientist at Fate Therapeutics in San Diego, CA.

**Tannaz Faal, Ph.D.** was a graduate student in the Inlay lab. She worked on a project to develop brain-specific perivascular cells (PCs) from human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines. She developed two different differentiation strategies to make brain PCs, utilizing both a neuroectoderm differentiation protocol, as well as a mesoderm differentiation protocol to create induced PCs. These cells could potentially be paired with iPSC derived endothelial cells and astrocytes to create an in vitro model of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) for studies of the role of the BBB in neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Tannaz successfully defended her thesis in 2018 and joined Kite Pharma as a scientist.

**Yasamine Ghorbanian, Ph.D.** was a graduate student the Inlay lab. Her research focused on the origins of blood-forming stem cells in embryonic development. Her main research project was to better understand which tissues produced blood-forming stem cells in the embryo that could give rise to HSCs in the adults. To that end, she employed a lineage tracing system to mark the embryonic yolk sac (YS) and showed that yolk sac-derived cells could make up as much as 50% of HSCs in the adults, implicating an important role for the yolk sac in producing embryonic pre-HSCs that could mature into adult HSCs. After graduating in 2019, she took an industry scientist position at Orca Bio in Menlo Park, CA.

Masters Students

**Yueyao Li, M.S.** was a masters student in the Masters of Science Degree in Biotechnology (MSBT) program at UCI. She worked on a project to test the effect of glucocorticoid treatment of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) to identify GCs that could negatively impact conventional T lymphocytes, as a potential treatment to prevent graft-versus-host disease (GvHD). Yueyao finished her masters in 2023.

**Xiyu Chen, M.S.** was a masters student in the Masters of Science in Biotechnology (MSBT) program. She did her masters research in the Inlay lab looking at the expression of the antiapoptotic protein Bcl2 during T cell culture in glucocorticoids, and showed that Bcl2 express decreases during culture. She also examined a Bcl2 overexpressing transgenic mouse and showed that T cells from these mice are able to resist apoptosis caused by glucocortcoid culture, demonstrating a critical role for this protein in the glucocorticoid mediated ablation of T cells that may cause graft-verus-host disease (GvHD). Xiyu received her masters in 2022 and took a position in Aileen Anderson’s lab in the Stem Cell Research Center at UCI.

**Artemis Yip, M.S**. was a masters student in the Masters of Science Degree in Biotechnology (MSBT) program. Their research focused on analyzing a mouse model of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), an autoimmune disease of platelets. Artemis characterized a new mouse model developed in the lab called LMOH, and focused on the platelet counts after immunization of the activating antigen that causes ITP in this model. Artemis completed their masters in biotechnology 2022.

**Lok Tung “Iris” Wong, M.S.** was a masters studnet in the Masters of Science Degree in Biotechnology (MSBT) program. She was the first masters studnet in the Inlay lab. Iris did her masters research on idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), an autoimmune disorder of platelets. Her research involved the first characterization of a novel mouse model of ITP created in the lab. She developed the first tools we used to analyze the mice and their platelets, including testing out antibodies to identify the foreign antigen expressed on platelets, and developing a cell line to test the antibodies on. After graduating in 2021, she was hired by Sorrento Therapeutics in San Diego, CA.

Undergraduates

**Cuiwen Zhou, B.S.** was a lab manager
and undergraduate student at UCI
majoring in microbiology and immunology.
She was born and raised in China until
the age of 13 when she moved to the US.
In the lab, she studies the effects of
glucocorticoids on T cells *in vitro*.
Aside from the lab, she is also highly
involved on campus, such as being a general
chemistry peer tutor coordinator, learning
assistant, volunteering, etc. During her
free time, she enjoys watching dramas,
hanging out with family and friends, and
learning new languages. Cuiwen graduated in
2024 and is attending dental school at UCSF.

High School

August 14, 2023Matthew Inlay

New Publication in EMBO Molecular Medicine

The Inlay lab is happy to announce a new publication from our lab in EMBO Molecular Medicine. The title of the article is, “Graft conditioning with fluticasone propionate reduces graft-versus-host disease upon allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation in mice“. In this article, we show that culturing donor graft cells in the glucocorticoid fluticasone propionate has two important effects that can improve bone marrow transplantation. First, the hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in the graft have increased engraftment potential upon transplantation. Second, if the graft is mismatched from the host, there is a reduction in Graft-versus-Host Disease (GvHD), a complication whereby immune cells in the graft can attack the patient after transplantation. The project was spearheaded by Erika Varady, a former Ph.D. student in the lab, and Angel Ayala, a current Ph.D. student. Erika and Angel share co-first authorship of this manuscript. Additional co-authors include collaborators Professor Craig Walsh and his former Ph.D. student Scott Greilach, who assisted with the design and implementation of many of the experiments and provided critical insight on T cell biology. Vanessa Scarfone and Pauline Nguyen from the Stem Cell Research Center’s Flow Cytometry Core were also essential for the completion of the project. Additional collaborators include Cuiwen Zhou, an undergraduate researcher in the lab and the lab manager, Alborz Karimzadeh, a former Ph.D. student that trained Erika and helped with the early HSC experiments, and Xiyu Chen, a former masters student who assisted with the GvHD projects. Much of the funding for this project was provided by a generous gift from the Oxnard Foundation. A link to the original publication can be found here:

https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.202317748

July 21, 2022Matthew Inlay

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