Francesca Mariani, Gage Crump and Jay Lieberman have won a Regenerative Medicine Award, funded by Carmen A. Puliafito, dean of the Keck School of Medicine of USC. The team will focus on potential ways to repair human bones through lessons learned from two not-so-distant relatives: mice and zebrafish. When mouse ribs or zebrafish jaws are damaged, special cartilage cells transform themselves into bone-producing cells called osteoblasts. The research team hopes to show that these cells can more effectively heal severe bone damage that is a challenge to current therapeutic approaches.

To read more, visit stemcell.usc.edu/2013/08/05/usc-announces-winners-of-first-regenerative-medicine-initiative-awards.