Grants

Tietze Research Awards to two NDRG faculty members

Grants, Honors / /

Both grants offered in 2026 by the John H. Tietze Foundation Trust have been awarded to NDRG faculty members.

Katie Liu received the Jaconette L. Tietze Young Scientist Award. The award will support her lab’s efforts to use patient-derived adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells to improve repair of their injured nerves.

Mark Bothwell received the John H. Tietze Stem Cell Scientist Award. The award will allow gene-edited induced pluripotent stem cells to be produced to permit drug-controlled expression of the transcription factors EGFR2 and EGR3, which are master regulators of differentiation of myelinating Schwann cells from stem cells.

Both projects illustrate NDRG’s commitment to discover approaches to block degeneration and improve regeneration of peripheral nerves.

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Alec Smith and NDRG team awarded NIH R21 grant

Grants, Research / /

Alec Smith is the PI of a newly awarded NIH R21 grant to study muscle spindle dysfunction in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. David Mack, Mike Regnier, and Mark Bothwell are co-investigators.

Muscle spindles are sensory end organs in muscle that allow sensation of muscle position and movement. As muscle spindles are comprised of clusters of specialized types of muscle fibers, their proper function is likely dependent on dystrophin, just as the muscle proper is. Dystrophin mutations in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy cause a loss of muscle cell dystrophin. Thus, it is plausible that DMD patients may experience muscle spindle dysfunction, which may contribute to the tendency of DMD patients to suffer frequent falls.

In order to develop an experimental system to study human muscle spindle function, Alec and team will produce muscle spindle cells in vitro, by differentiation of induced pluripotent stem cells bearing a dystrophin mutation, and from wild type control cells.

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Alec Smith awarded NIH R03 grant

Grants / /

Alec Smith has been awarded a two-year R03 grant from NIH entitled Using functional readouts from engineering models of innervated skeletal muscle to assess the efficacy of CRISPR-based c9orf72 ALS gene therapies.

This project is part of a larger effort to employ human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived motor neurons and skeletal muscle to produce in vitro models of the neuromuscular junction to model motor neuron diseases in order to study disease mechanisms and for drug screens.

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