Dr. Curt Civin, a pioneer in cancer research, has joined the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore as a professor of pediatrics, associate dean for research and founding director of the school’s new Center for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.
Civin, who has served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore for 30 years, brings with him his entire research team of 15 postdoctoral fellows, students and researchers.
Civin spoke with The Examiner about his research and plans for the center.
What appealed to you about the University of Maryland?
Really it was the leadership opportunity. It was the opportunity to expand my lab greatly and to build the stem-cell institute. Hopkins already had a stem-cell institute, and it would be great fun to serve as associate dean for research.
There is a big impetus to increase research at Maryland. They are really growing. It will be neat to help catalyze that.
You are credited with developing a way to isolate stem cells from other blood cells. Now you focus on genes expressed in stem cells. What does that mean?
We really don’t know how stem cells work. How does it decide to hibernate? How do some of them decide to wake up and decide to produce progeny, children, mature cells of our body? How do they decide what cells they are going to be?
All these questions are decided at the level of the genes. With the availability of the knowledge of the human and other genomes, we can quickly figure out what genes the stem cells are using and which of these are important for these processes.
What are your plans for this center?
The neat thing is that there is incredible interest in stem-cell research in all scientific quarters. There is interest in all the schools [at the University of Maryland]: The law school, the computer scientists, the physicists. If you put that all together, it’s a tremendous enterprise, and it’s not organized yet.
We are hoping something like Jan. 21 [when President-elect Barack Obama is inaugurated] that the really strange, odd [federal] restrictions on stem-cell research will be lifted. More than that, we are hoping the incoming team will see scientific research in general as an infrastructure. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to thinking we should be building roads and bridges. In Maryland, research is a very big business.
