James Adjaye, PhD
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JAD profile
Affiliation(s):
Institute for stem cell research and regenerative medicine; Medical Faculty; Heinrich Heine University; Duesseldorf; Germany
Areas of Interest:
Alzheimer's disease; Alzheimer's genetics; Alzheimer's models, genomic approaches to transcriptional regulation and disease basis
Biography & Research:
Professor Dr. James Affram Adjaye has a BSc (Honours) degree in Biochemistry from University College of Cardiff, Wales. He then obtained an MSc in Biochemistry from the University of Sussex,Brighton and then PhD in Biochemistry from King's College- London. Adjaye was head of the Molecular Embryology and Aging group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics- Berlin, Germany. He is now Director of the Institute for Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine within the Faculty of Medicine at the Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany. He is involved in systems biology-based projects both at the national and international level where iPSCs are used to model Alzheimer (AD) and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD).
Co-ordination activities
Workpackage leader in an EU/FP7-funded project- AgedBrainSYSBIO (EU/FP7-HEALTH-2012.2.2.2-1) http://www.agedbrainsysbio.eu/
The consortium combines integrative systems biology and comparative genomics for studying human ageing and /or most common age-related diseases. The tasks here include the derivation of iPSCs from Alzheimer’s disease patients and modeling the disease the in vitro.
Scientific overview
My research is divided into five inter-related areas
1. Transcriptional and signal transduction mechanisms regulating self-renewal and pluripotency in human embryonic stem cells, carcinoma cells and iPS cells.
2. Reprogramming of somatic cells from healthy and diseased (Alzheimer’s, Nijmegen Breakage Syndrome and Steatosis patients) individuals into iPS cells and studying the underlying disease mechanisms.
3. Derivation and characterisation of functional hepatocytes and neuronal cells derived from human ES cells and patient-specific iPS cells with the aim of establishing a platform for toxicology studies and drug screens.
4. Systems biology of stem cell fate and cellular reprogramming.
5. iPS-based models of age-associated gene expression patterns and signal transduction mechanisms employing human bone marrow-derived MSCs and dermal fibroblast cells from young and aged individuals as model systems.
