Michael Helmrath, MD, surgical director of the
Intestinal Rehabilitation Center, and his team focus on strategies to improve the outcomes in children with intestinal failure. Understanding the biology of intestinal stem cells is a key to unravel the mechanism involved during the disease process. To that end, the Helmrath team developed in vitro culture techniques to maintain and expand individual human intestinal stem cell derived from human tissue samples and pluripotent stem cells as well as surgical animal models. As part of the
Intestinal Stem Cell Consortium (ISCC, NIH), the Helmrath Lab is actively involved in the intestinal stem cell field.