The 2019 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award will support Lucas Smith’s research on finding promising therapies that can improve mobility and quality of life for children with cerebral palsy.
“I feel honored and excited to be selected for this award and to join the Hartwell network of researchers working to improve children’s health,” said Lucas Smith, an assistant professor in the department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior at the College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis School of Medicine.
Cerebral Palsy is the most common childhood movement disabilities, occurring in one of every 250 to 500 births. It is caused by a permanent injury to the brain’s cerebral cortex, the section that controls movement. While the symptoms may differ in type and severity, all people with Cerebral Palsy have problems with movement and posture.
“Our MyoMatrix Lab will be the first to simultaneously measure muscle stiffness and connective tissue structure using advanced microscopic techniques to detect architectural features that lead to stiffness in contracture,” Smith said.
Muscle contractures are common during childhood growth spurts, where muscle growth is unable to keep up with lengthening bones. A healthy muscle can lengthen in response to a growth stretch, mainly due to the muscle’s stem cells. In case of muscle contractures, the fewer stem cells present limit the muscle’s growth capacity. The stiffness of the muscle tissue in contractures seems to affect the stem cell function and abundance.
“We will apply cutting-edge, single-cell sequencing technology to classify the state of muscle stem cells in contracture and the cell populations that support their function,” Smith said.
Smith and his team will engineer substrates to mimic the stiffness of muscle in both healthy and contractured states. They will determine if the stiffness of the contracture is a key aspect that stem cells sense, thus blocking their ability to support muscle growth.
