The roles and controls of GATA factors in blood and cardiac development.

GATA factors play central roles in the programming of blood and cardiac cells during embryonic development. Using the experimentally accessible Xenopus and zebrafish models, we report observations regarding the roles of GATA-2 in the development of blood stem cells and GATA-4, -5, and -6 in cardiac development. We show that blood stem cells develop from the dorsal lateral plate mesoderm and GATA-2 is required at multiple stages.

Aerosol: A Novel Vehicle for Pharmacotherapy in Neonates.

Background: Local delivery of drugs to the lungs of newborn infant represents an unmet need as no drugs have been approved. Potential benefits could be large. Development of aerosol for delivery of drugs to infants and newborn offers huge potential for better therapy.

Dendritic cells and pluripotency: unlikely allies in the pursuit of immunotherapy.

As the fulcrum on which the balance between the opposing forces of tolerance and immunity has been shown to pivot, dendritic cells (DC) hold significant promise for immune intervention in a variety of disease states. Here we discuss how the directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells may address many of the current obstacles to the use of monocyte-derived DC in immunotherapy, providing a novel source of previously inaccessible DC subsets and opportunities for their scale-up, quality control and genetic modification. Indeed, given that it is the immunological legacy DC leave behind that is of therapeutic value, rather than their persistence per se, we propose that immunotherapy should serve as an early target for the clinical application of pluripotent stem cells.