On October 29th, the UCR Stem Cell Center co-sponsored a symposium on Tobacco-Related Disease Research. The symposium was well attended by UCR faculty, students and staff and by researchers from both southern and northern California. The event featured platform presentations by 10 speakers as well as a poster session. A broad range of new information on tobacco related disease was presented including studies that were done using stem cell based assays.

The results of their work clearly show that sidestream smoke is more harmful than mainstream smoke in hESC assays and that sidestream smoke from harm reduction cigarettes impairs growth of human embryonic stem cells more than smoke from a conventional brand. These results are important in demonstrating significant toxicity in harm reduction products that are often promoted as being safer than conventional tobacco products.

Stem cell presentations were given by Drs. Sabrina Lin, Nicole zur Nieden, and Duncan Liew from the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience. In addition, posters dealing with stem cell research were presented by Ivann Martinez and Anthony Bianchi, Jonathan Balkumar and Victor Slupski, and Rachel Behar, Sabrina Lin, and Nikki Weng.

Please click the link below to see the complete program for the Symposium.

UCR Symposium on Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program