Sean J. Morrison

Sean J. Morrison
Institutions
Alma mater
See also: Sean Morrison

Sean J. Morrison holds the positions of professor and director of the Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI); Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.[1] Morrison also is the principal investigator for the Hamon Laboratory for Stem Cell and Cancer Biology at CRI, which pursues research on the mechanisms that regulate stem cell function in the nervous and hematopoietic systems, and the ways in which those mechanisms are hijacked by cancer cells. Morrison established CRI in 2011 with the mission to perform transformative biomedical research to better understand the biological basis of disease. CRI is a joint venture positioned to build upon the comprehensive clinical expertise of Children’s Medical Center of Dallas and the internationally recognized scientific environment of UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Since its founding, CRI researchers have developed an approach for mapping the environments within the blood-forming system that nurture the process of blood-cell formation, in the process identifying a microenvironment in the bone marrow where blood-forming stem cells are maintained, and another that fosters the specialized cells that produce infection-fighting T cells and B cells. In the long run, the research could increase the safety and effectiveness of blood-forming stem cell transplants, such as those performed after healthy marrow is destroyed by chemotherapy or radiation treatments for childhood leukemia. The findings also could have implications for treating illnesses associated with a loss of infection-fighting cells, such as HIV and severe combined immunodeficiency, better known as bubble boy disease. CRI also has developed an innovative model for predicting the progression of skin cancer in patients, which may lead to new prognostic markers that can identify patients at the highest risk of disease progression, as well as new therapies.

In addition to the findings at CRI, Morrison's laboratory has discovered a number of critical mechanisms that distinguish stem cell self-renewal from the proliferation of restricted progenitors. They have shown that stem cell self-renewal is regulated by networks of proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressors and that the balance between proto-oncogenic and tumor suppressor signals changes with age. This likely explains why the mutation spectrum changes with age in cancer patients, as different mechanisms become competent to hyper-activate self-renewal pathways in patients at different ages. His laboratory has further shown that in some cancers many tumor cells are capable of driving disease growth and progression while other cancers are driven by minority subpopulations of cancer cells that adopt stem cell characteristics. These insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of self-renewal have suggested new approaches for promoting normal tissue regeneration and cancer treatment.

Morrison completed a BSc in biology and chemistry at Dalhousie University (1991), then a Ph.D. in immunology from Stanford University (1996), and a postdoctoral fellowship in neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology (1999). From 1999 to 2011, Morrison was at the University of Michigan, where he directed the Center for Stem Cell Biology. Morrison was a Searle Scholar (2000-2003), and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2003), the International Society for Hematology and Stem Cells McCulloch and Till Award (2007), the American Association of Anatomists Harland Mossman Award (2008), and a MERIT Award from the National Institute on Aging (2009).

Morrison also has been active in public policy issues surrounding stem cell research. He has twice testified before the U.S. Congress and was a leader in the successful Proposal 2 campaign to protect stem cell research in Michigan’s state constitution.

References

  1. ↑ Toward Precision Medicine:: Building a Knowledge Network for Biomedical Research and a New Taxonomy of Disease. National Academies Press. 2011. p. 103. ISBN 9780309222228. Retrieved 12 October 2014.
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