Dr. Nostro joined the McEwen Stem Cell Institute (formerly the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine) in September 2012 as Principal Investigator and currently holds the Harry Rosen Chair in Diabetes Regenerative Medicine Research. The objective of her research is to differentiate pluripotent stem cells to pancreatic cells, with the ultimate goal of generating functional insulin-producing β cells for transplantation in patients with type 1 diabetes and eliminate the need for daily insulin injections.
Dr. Nostro obtained a Laurea in Biology (BSc and MSc equivalent) from the University of Florence, Italy in 2000. As an undergraduate student, she participated in the Erasmus Exchange Program and joined Professor Chris Potten’s laboratory at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, in Manchester, UK. Her stay in his laboratory sparked her interest in stem cell biology and her desire to pursue an academic career.
In 2000, with a Fellowship from the Italian National Research Council, she enrolled as a PhD student at The University of Manchester and under the supervision of Dr. Gerard Brady, studied blood stem cells and became an expert in gene expression profiling of these cells at the single cell level. After obtaining her PhD in 2004, she was drawn to study a new model system and applied for a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Dr. Gordon Keller at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NY, where she focused on understanding the earliest stages of blood cell formation using embryonic stem cells. After relocating to Toronto in 2007, she progressed to her scientific independency by initiating a project on pancreatic development.
In her independent research career, Dr. Nostro has defined critical pathways leading to the efficient generation of hPSC-derived pancreatic progenitors in vitro (Nostro et al., Stem Cell Reports 2015) and recently, through the use of a proteomics approach, identified a specific marker that allows the purification of these β cell progenitors (Cogger et al., Nat. Communications 2017). Since 2015, Dr. Nostro has been leading a multi-investigator team aimed at developing novel transplantation approaches for type 1 diabetes therapy.
