Dr. Freda Miller said she has always strived “to improve the life of one person in a tangible way.”
Through her research on stem cells and her quest to “unravel how the nervous system was built and using these principles to repair injured systems,” Miller, a senior researcher at the Hospital for Sick Kids, promises to improve the lives of people around the globe.
Stem cells have the potential to form any cell in the body, including nerve cells or neurons, the biological wires that make up our nervous system. Potentially, neurons derived from stem cells could be used therapeutically to repair nerve damage associated with spinal cord injuries or neural diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Scientists initially thought that stem cells were restricted in location to the embryo, and that the source of any therapeutic stem cells would have to be aborted fetuses.
Miller obtained her PhD in Medical Sciences at the University of Calgary in 1984, and came to U of T in 2002.
That previous year, while researching stem cells at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Miller discovered they can be found in the skin as well. New skin cells are constantly regenerated, as older skin cells die from the wear and tear of everyday life.
Miller found that new skin cells are formed from stem cells, found just under the surface of skin. Because skin cells contain sensory receptors akin to neurons, Miller investigated whether skin stem cells could also turn into nerve cells. She found that the “dermis” layer of skin, found just below the surface skin layer or epidermis, contained nerve cell precursors, cells that could possibly have therapeutic use.
The major benefit of Miller’s discovery is that the skin is a less ethically controversial source of stable and abundant stem cells, when compared to aborted fetuses. Furthermore, skin-derived stem cells have a lower rejection rate during therapeutic treatment than stem cells harvested from embryos.
Miller’s previous research includes work on how proteins function in nerve cells, including proteins that help nerve cells resist damage after chemotherapy. Recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Society for her accomplishments, Miller holds a Canada Research Chair in Developmental Neurobiology.
On the side, Miller founded Aegera Therapeutics in 2001, to develop treatments that make use of some of the things she has discovered. Last year, Aegera won a patent on treatments involving “multipotent neural stem cells,” extracted from the dermis.
Other treatments in the works involve controlling a process in the cell called apoptosis-which essentially causes the cell to commit suicide. This process in inadvertently triggered during conventional cancer treatments, with debilitating side-effects. One trick is to rescue irradiated nerve cells from self-induced death. A neater one is to selectively kill cancer cells, by inducing apoptosis in them.
The sixth in our series on U of T profs newly elected into the Royal Society of Canada-the academic’s hall of fame. In the society’s words, “Election to the Royal Society of Canada is the highest honour that can be attained by scholars, artists and scientists in Canada.” This year, sixty new fellows were elected into the society. They will be inducted at a ceremony on November 27, 2005.
Members of the Canadian arts community will soon be elected into the body as well. The RSC says it will welcome fifteen such individuals this year-but they have yet to be named.
