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HANNA MIKKOLA, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology
Hanna Mikkola is a new UCLA faculty member who joined the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology/ Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center in July 2005. Dr. Mikkola earned her MD/PhD degrees at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her doctoral thesis was based on pioneering studies on the molecular genetics of a congenital bleeding disorder, factor XIII deficiency. Mikkola has been interested in stem cell biology since 1998 when she started post-doctoral training in the Department of Gene Therapy and Molecular Medicine in Lund University, Sweden. She developed lentiviral vector based gene transfer protocols for stem cells and showed that these vectors are efficient tools to express transgenes in murine hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) and ES-cells. In 2000, Mikkola continued to work with hematopoietic stem cells at Children’s Hospital/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School, Boston. Her studies focused on resolving the role of leukemia related transcription factor SCL/tal1 in the development and maintenance of HSCs. Furthermore, recent studies led by Mikkola identified a novel hematopoietic site, the placenta, where HSCs are born and nurtured during early fetal life. At UCLA, Mikkola will continue to pursue to define the molecular programs and micro-environmental cues that direct HSC formation, maturation, and expansion during fetal development. As the main limitation that is holding back HSC related therapies is the inability to maintain their pluripotency and self-renewal capacity in culture, understanding how these programs develop in the embryo will be instrumental in improving culture conditions to expand cord blood or bone marrow HSCs, or to generate functional HSCs from human ES-cells.
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