Dr. Hanna Mikkola's group is interested in the development of hematopoietic stem cells (HSC). Their goal is to identify members of the transcriptional regulatory network that controls HSC development and function. As many of these regulators are involved both in normal blood cell development and in hematopoietic malignancies, understanding how these molecules work will also unravel the regulatory mechanisms that are disturbed in leukemias. Another line of their research focuses on studying the fetal hematopoietic microenvironments that nurture developing HSCs. As the main limitation hindering improvement of HSC therapies is the inability to maintain the self-renewal capacity and pluripotency of HSCs in culture, understanding how these programs develop in the embryo will be instrumental for learning how to expand cord blood or bone marrow HSCs, or even to generate HSCs from human embryonic stem cells, ultimately developing better cure for leukemia and other blood cell disorders.