The cell maker

For Gordon Keller, collaboration is the key

Just as the interview for this article is about to start, Gordon Keller, Canada Research Chair in Embryonic Stem Cell Biology, asks, “Have you ever actually seen a stem cell in a dish?” And with that, he leads you through a series of hallways to his lab situated in the Toronto Medical Discovery Tower at the MaRS Centre. He gathers members of his research team and asks them to set up slides under microscopes.

“Go ahead,” says one of the team. “Take a look.”

And there they are — the magical and mysterious stem cells you’ve heard about, the potential source of the elusive cures for conditions like heart disease and diabetes, right before your eyes. But why are they pulsing?

“Because we’ve generated heart cells from them,” says Keller. “So they beat like a heart.”

Back in his office, Keller, also director of the University Health Network’s McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine and a professor of medical biophysics at U of T — illustrates the science of stem cells and his own work on a marker board. It’s complicated, but Keller — a superstar in this field, named by New York Magazine as one of the six doctors New York City couldn’t afford to lose when he was director of the Black Family Stem Cell Institute at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine — would have made a great high school science teacher. He makes stem cell science sound simple.

A major goal of this work is to use the stem cell-derived heart cells for transplantation to treat damaged hearts. This is a very long-term goal. There are more immediate applications, specifically using these cells for what he calls ‘predictive toxicology’ or, the testing of drugs. “At the present time there is no method to test the effects of new drugs on human heart cells. With our ability to generate these cells from stem cells, we will have a constant supply of heart cells for evaluating potential toxic effects of new drugs, long before they are developed for the market. We believe this type of screening will eventually be used by pharmaceutical companies as part of their drug screening platforms.”

In another part of the lab, Keller’s team is using the same stem cells to create pancreatic cells that may one day be transplanted into diabetic patients, so they don’t have to rely on manually injecting insulin or using an insulin pump. “The possibility of using pancreatic cells to treat diabetes is likely a sooner bet than using the heart cells to treat heart disease but there is still work to be done there as well.”

Collaboration is common in all of Keller’s work. “What we do is totally collaborative. We are not experts in pancreatic or heart function. We can make different cell types, but then we need help. I could show you these beating cells all you want, but the question is, ‘What are you going to do with them?’ So we collaborate. If you don’t collaborate, you don’t progress. That’s our overall focus at the McEwen Centre.” This collaborative spirit extends beyond the local community as Keller distributes the heart cells he creates to scientists in other countries including England, Germany and the US.

And that’s why he came back to Canada. “When the opportunity came to direct the McEwen Centre, I thought, ‘U of T has a great stem cell community and with the hospitals, a very large research enterprise. Here’s an opportunity to make things better and to do exciting things.’”