About Dr. Martin Pera
Martin Pera is professor and foundation director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of Southern California. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English language and literature from the College of William and Mary, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in pharmacology from George Washington University. Pera carried out postdoctoral research at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, and was a research fellow at the Department of Zoology at Oxford University. Thereafter he moved to Australia where he became a research professor at the Monash Institute of Medical Research at Monash University, and the director of embryonic stem cell research at the Australian Stem Cell Centre.
His research interests include the cell biology of human pluripotent stem cells, early human development, and germ cell tumors. Pera was among a small number of researchers who pioneered the isolation and characterization of pluripotent stem cells from human germ cell tumors of the testis—research that provided an important framework for the development of human embryonic stem cells. His laboratory at Monash University was the second in the world to isolate embryonic stem cells from the human blastocyst, and the first to describe their differentiation into somatic cells in vitro.
He has provided extensive advice to state, national and international regulatory authorities on the scientific background to human embryonic stem cell research. Pera serves on the steering group of the International Stem Cell Initiative and is on the advisory board of the National Stem Cell Bank (United States) and ESTOOLS (European Union) and is a member of the standards committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. He is author of about 100 research publications and 14 issued patents and published patent applications.
Pera's research group focuses on the extrinsic factors (signals from outside the cell) involved in maintenance of the pluripotent state in human embryonic stem cells and those factors that drive stem cell commitment into progenitor cells representative of the three embryonic germ layers (the precursors of the primordia that form the tissues of the body). A major hypothesis behind this work is that stem cell cultures represent a community of different cell types, similar to those found in the embryo around the time of implantation into the womb, and that just as communication between different cell populations in the embryo act to specify cell fate during development, similar conversations control stem cell maintenance and differentiation in vitro.
This work has fundamental importance for our understanding of stem cell biology, but it also addresses practical questions that must be solved before human embryonic stem cells can achieve their full potential in research and medicine.
Propagation of stem cells on a large scale in a pure form under fully defined conditions and without accumulation of genetic damage in the cell is essential for production of sufficient numbers of cells for large scale research projects and clinical trials. Understanding how to control the differentiation of stem cells is essential to producing desired types of mature cells in sufficient quantity and in pure form for use in laboratory research or regenerative medicine. Work in the Pera laboratory addresses both these challenges.