MD PhD Program

Student Name: Brian G. Ballios
Supervisors: Dr. Derek van der Kooy and Dr. Molly Shoichet
PhD Thesis: New Approaches to the Transplantation of Stem Cells and their Progeny for the Treatment of Retinal Degeneration

Retinal disease leads to permanent vision loss for which there is no regenerative treatment.  Our pharmacologic approaches can only serve to stave off the progression of disease, but they do not represent a restorative approach to vision loss.  Cellular transplantation shows promise for replacing the light-sensitive photoreceptors responsible for vision in the retina; however, transplantation in retinal disease is limited by poor distribution, survival and integration of cells in vivo after standard delivery in saline vehicle.  Brian was interested in addressing each of these barriers in order to improve transplant efficacy.  With an undergraduate degree in Engineering Chemistry and his concurrent MD training, he wanted to combine his passion for both engineering and medicine into a fruitful career in academic medicine.  During his PhD, he proposed a new collaboration between two different fields of research – stem cell biology and tissue engineering – and used his unique background to identify a new approach to the transplantation of stem cells and their progeny in the treatment of retinal degeneration.  Brian’s work led to the design of the first injectable biomaterial-based cell delivery vehicle to transplant adult stem cell progeny into the subretinal space of adult retina.  He further showed that clonally isolated multipotent mouse and human retinal stem cells (RSCs) could be directed toward a mature rod photoreceptor fate with the highest efficiency reported to date (>95%).  When combined with the biomaterial delivery system, this resulted in the highest levels of functional integration of adult stem cell-derived rod photoreceptors relative to previous reports in the literature.

Brian received his PhD in 2013 from the Institute of Medical Sciences as part of the combined MD/PhD Program (MD ’15, PhD ’13).  His research was supported by a CIHR Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarship, a CIHR MD/PhD studentship, and the McLaughlin Centre Graduate Fellowship.

Brian is currently a first year resident physician in Ophthalmology at the University of Toronto.  He hopes that his experiences, both academic and clinical, will put him in a key position for innovation in ophthalmologic research in the future.