James Dutton, PhD

My complete research portfolio is now extremely collaborative using the strength of team science to drive success of investigations designed to find new approaches to disease modeling and treatment.  I am the PI of a project using miPSC-derived limb bud progenitors to improve limb and digit regeneration and the Team PI of an NEI-funded RO1 with Prof. Ferrington in the Department of Ophthalmology generating an extensive biobank of iPSC-derived RPE from patients and eye donors with Dry Age-related Macular Degeneration.  These iPSC-RPE provide an excellent experimental model to study mitochondrial dysfunction in AMD and for screening compounds that may maintain or restore mitochondrial function in the RPE of patients with AMD.  I have also developed novel accelerated neural induction protocols to efficiently generate hiPSC-derived neuronal and glial cells for testing regenerative strategies to treat neural injury and disease.  The experience from this work is directly relevant to the current Harrington proposal where we will utilize a similar protocol to generate the cortical neurons from multiple hiPSC lines for drug screening.  The research team I lead also works on a range of other team projects including using iPSCs and blastocyst complementation to generate liver cells, using iPSCs and automation to investigate DMSO-free cryopreservation strategies for stem cells and stem cell-derived products and we are working with the Lions Gift of Sight Eye bank in Minneapolis to derive limbal stem cells from hiPSCs to support potential clinical use of these cells to repair corneal damage.