Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Dr. Czechowicz’s research is aimed primarily at understanding how hematopoietic stem cells interact with their microenvironment in order to subsequently modulate these interactions to ultimately improve bone marrow transplantation and unlock biological secrets that further enable regenerative medicine broadly. She is interested in increasing our basic science understanding of these interactions and also developing new novel therapies that stem from this work to expand treatment options for a wide variety of pediatric and adult diseases. Her group is primarily focused on studying the cell surface receptors on hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells and bone marrow stromal cells, and is actively learning how manipulating these can alter cell state and cell fate. Her group is using cells and serum from both mice and primary specimens from healthy and diseased patients for these studies and using a variety of exciting new tools and methods to unlock future discoveries. There are many exciting opportunities that stem from her work across a variety of disease states ranging from rare genetic diseases, autoimmune diseases, solid organ transplantation, microbiome and cancer. While her group is primarily focused on blood and immune diseases, the expanded potential of this work is much broader and can be applied to other organ systems as well and she is very eager to develop collaborations across disease areas.
Dr. Czechowicz has also been part of the initial founding team of several companies including Global Blood Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, Decibel Therapeutics and Magenta Therapeutics and advises multiple other transformative companies. As a true physician scientist, she has done pioneering work showing that hematopoietic stem cell depletion is a critical component to donor hematopoietic stem cell engraftment, and multiple pre-clinical and clinical therapies are in development based upon her studies. Stanford has had several clinical trials derived from Dr. Czechowicz’s research.
Research Interests: Hematopoietic Stem Cells (HSC), Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation (HSCT), Monoclonal Antibodies, Immunotoxins, Cell Cycle, Cell Fate, Cell Membrane, Cell Surface Antigens, Microenvironment, Stem Cell Niche, Cell Proliferation, Stem Cell Quiescence, DNA Damage, DNA Repair, Rare Genetic Diseases, Bone Marrow Failure, Aplastic Anemia, Genomics, Fanconi Anemia (FA), Immunodeficiency (SCID), Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors (GIST), Rhabdomyosarcoma, Neuroblastoma, Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS), Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), Graft vs Host Disease (GVHD), Immune Tolerance, Histocompatibility Testing, Immunologic Deficiency Syndromes, Hemoglobinopathies, Transplantation Conditioning, Immune Tolerance, Gene Therapy, Gene-Editing, Base-Editing, Cytokines, Cytokine Receptors, Serum, Clinical Trials, Autoimmune diseases, Multiple Sclerosis, Microbiome, Cancer, Cell Therapy, Allogenic Bone Marrow Transplantation (BMT), Metabolic Diseases, Hurler Syndrome
For more information, please visit our lab webpage: http://med.stanford.edu/czechowiczlab.html
