Regenerative medicine is the next generation of health care—with doctors using new tools and techniques to regrow, reprogram and reset bodily systems that have gone awry.
A big part of regenerative medicine will rely on the power of stem cells, the undifferentiated cells that have the power to morph into just about any tissue in the human body. Xiaoping Bao, who is joining the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an associate professor in January 2027, hopes to advance regenerative medicine. He plans to develop new techniques to nudge stem cells to develop into immune system cells, with enough quantity and purity to make them useful in cellular and molecular therapies for cancer, diabetes, degenerative diseases and other health issues.
Bao began his journey in stem cell therapy as a graduate student at UW-Madison, working with Milton J. and A. Maude Shoemaker Professor Sean Palecek in CBE to develop techniques to convert stem cells into various cardiovascular cells for testing and medical therapies. After that, he completed a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, diversifying his stem cell techniques to create neuronal tissue to study brain disorders.
In 2019, Bao joined the chemical engineering faculty at Purdue University. There, in his own lab, Bao decided to delve into the new and unproven field of immunoengineering or developing immune cell therapies from stem cells.
“Taking that step from neurons and cardiovascular cells to stem cell immune engineering was kind of risky,” he says. “Overall, we want to boost human or animal immune systems and reengineer them to target cancer cells. So far, the results are not bad.”
In fact, Bao has made progress on several fronts. In general, his work combines stem cells, biomaterials, microfluidics, CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing and adeno-associated virus (AAV)-mediated gene delivery to develop novel cell and gene therapies.
He is currently testing a treatment for glioma, a cancer that affects parts of the brain and spinal cord, based on work genetically reprogramming white blood cells called neutrophils in vivo, or inside an animal system. His team is also looking into therapies for prostate cancer and blood cancers like leukemia, and he believes his lab’s techniques could apply to many other types of cancer.
Moving to UW-Madison, Bao says, makes a lot of sense for his work. Not only does the university have one of the most active stem cell research communities in the United States, it also has a large research medical center, cancer treatment clinic and veterinary school that could help guide and test his work. It will also allow his therapies to be tested in large animals and in human trials.
In his new lab, Bao wants to continue developing these novel therapies and find ways to produce other types of important immune cells, including NK (natural killer) and T-cells for cancer, beta cells for diabetes and cardiac cells for heart disease. With a few modifications, Bao says his work could be used to develop therapies for many other diseases, like fibrosis and cardiac ailments, among others. “Whenever there are damaged or bad cells, we are trying to reprogram immune cells to kill them or treat the disease,” he says.
Bao says he’s excited to rejoin CBE, and on a personal note, he’s happy to return to Madison, this time with a family in tow. “I’m excited to bring my wife and kid to Madison and explore the beautiful lakes and maybe go ice fishing in the winter,” he says. “And I’ve really missed all of the good ice cream in the area.”