By Angelina Girgis As a child in Vietnam, Tracy Tran helped her family run a small business importing porcelain products from China and assumed she would follow in their footsteps. Neither of her parents had a college degree, and they worked very hard to support Tran and her sister. Once her parents finally had the Read More…

Andrew P. McMahon—who is the W.M. Keck Provost and University Professor in USC’s departments of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, and Biological Sciences at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences—has been elected as a new member of the National Academy of Sciences in honor of his Read More…

With support from a Broad Innovation Award, Andy McMahon is collaborating with Caltech biomedical engineer Long Cai to leverage a new technology for understanding chronic kidney disease. The technology, called seqFISH, provides information about genetic activity taking place in intact tissue—enabling the study of the interactions between cells in their native environments. To read more, Read More…

Only 23 percent of biomedical PhD holders eventually land tenure-track faculty positions, according to a report by the National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research Workforce Working Group. Beating these odds, six postdoctoral trainees from USC’s Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine recently landed coveted jobs as tenure-track assistant professors: Lori O’Brien at the Read More…

For the first time ever, the City of Los Angeles hosted the world’s largest stem cell conference. By choosing Los Angeles as the host city for this major annual meeting, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) acknowledged the city’s growing importance as a hub for the biosciences, as well as the world-class research Read More…

Every minute of every day, your organs are using a complex language to communicate with each other about the basic physiological processes necessary for life—everything from blood pressure regulation to pH balance to metabolism. To decipher this little-known language, USC Stem Cell scientist Andy McMahon has joined forces with top scientists at Harvard and Stanford Read More…

Running early or running late can have big consequences—especially when it comes to the progenitor cells involved in human kidney development. According to a new study in Developmental Cell from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Andy McMahon, the progenitor cells that form the kidney’s filtering units, called nephrons, mature into entirely different types of Read More…

In this 360 video, join Dr. Andy McMahon and our world-class scientists as they take you on a tour of the Eli and Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC.

  If you lose a limb, it’s lost for life. If you damage a kidney, you won’t grow a new one. And if you have a heart attack, the scars are there to stay. But regenerative medicine is poised to change all of this. Building new tissue is within sight, and USC scientists are among Read More…

Researchers are hard at work building mini-kidneys from human cells—using blueprints mostly drawn from lab mice. But mouse kidneys differ from their human counterparts in more than mere scale, as detailed by the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Andy McMahon in three studies in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. “In mice, the Read More…