Citizenship American Occupation Scientist | Known for Stem cell breakthrough Name Shoukhrat Mitalipov | |
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Alma mater Timiryazev Agricultural Academy
Research Centre of Medical Genetics | ||
Meet shoukhrat mitalipov
Shoukhrat Mitalipov (Shoe-KHRAHT Mee-tuhl-EE-pov, Russian: Шухрат Миталипов, born 1961) is an American biologist who heads the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. He is known for discovering a controversial genetic therapy that may be a way to prevent mitochondrial diseases, as well as a new way of creating human stem cells from skin cells.
Contents
- Meet shoukhrat mitalipov
- Stem cell breakthrough summarized by ohsu s dr shoukhrat mitalipov
- Early life
- Education
- Breakthroughs
- References
Stem cell breakthrough summarized by ohsu s dr shoukhrat mitalipov
Early life
Mitalipov was born in 1961 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union. He is of Uyghur ancestry. He served two years in Soviet military, beginning in 1979, as an army radio technician.
Education
After the military, Mitalipov studied genetics at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in Moscow, and also played blues guitar in a cover band to pay the bills. After graduation from the academy worked for a short time as the chief livestock specialist in the kolkhoz in the Yaroslavl region. He received his master's degree in 1989. He earned his Ph.D. in developmental and stem cell biology from the Research Centre of Medical Genetics in Moscow. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 funding for stem cell research was scarce, so Mitalipov applied for and won a fellowship at Utah State University in 1995. He started working at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in 1998, where he could work with monkeys, which share 98% of their DNA with humans; at Utah State Mitalipov had worked with cow DNA.
Breakthroughs
A therapy for mitochondrial diseases that Mitalipov discovered, the "spindle transfer" technique, involves removing the nucleus from a human egg and placing it into another. If the egg is fertilized, in genetic terms it would have three parents. Mitalipov has successfully bred "three-parent" rhesus macaques. The possibility of using the procedure on human eggs has raised safety and ethics questions.
In May 2013, Mitalipov and his team published a study in Cell that describes a new process for creating human stem cells from skin cells. The stem cell discovery made several journals' "Top 10" scientific breakthrough lists in 2013, including Nature, Science, Time, Discover, National Geographic, and The Week.
In July 2017, Mitalipov and his team performed the first known successful attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos, using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene modifying tool. Previously, there were only three reports of editing human embryos, which were all published by scientists in China.
Mitalipov and his team experimented upon a larger number of embryos, and further demonstrated the possibility of safely and efficiently correcting defective genes that cause inherited diseases.