Rita Perlingeiro, Ph.D.

Rita Perlingeiro (perli032@umn.edu) is a Lillehei Endowed Professor in Stem Cell and Regenerative Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She started her scientific path in her home country Brazil, where she earned her PhD degree in the University of Campinas, Sao Paulo, focusing on the study of genetic diseases and cell progenitor biology. In 1999 she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to pursue her postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute at MIT in the laboratory of Dr. George Daley. As a postdoctoral scientist, Dr. Perlingeiro investigated the nature of hematopoietic progenitors that emerge during the in vitro differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells. In 2003 Dr. Perlingeiro started her own research group at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where she expanded her research interests, initiating a new research program focused on the derivation of skeletal myogenic progenitors from differentiating pluripotent stem cells. In 2008 she moved her research group to the University of Minnesota. The Perlingeiro laboratory has a long-term interest in under-standing the molecular mechanisms controlling lineage-specific differentiation. Her team has pioneered methods to efficiently generate tissue-specific stem/progenitor cells endowed with long-term in vivo regenerative potential. These can be transplanted into dystrophic mice, where they produce large quantities of functional skeletal muscle that incorporates normally into the host muscle. Dr. Perlingeiro’s group has demonstrated feasibility for this strategy using pluripotent stem cells through reprogramming of mouse and human skin cells, and establishing genetic approaches to correct dystrophic iPS cells.

She has received several awards and honors, including the recent Department of Medicine Award for Research Excellent (2017), and the Lillehei Professorship in Stem Cell and Regenerative Cardiovascular Medicine. She has published more than 60 papers, including seminal publications in Nature Medicine, Cell Stem Cell, and Nature Communications, among others. She is currently funded by grants from NIH and the Department of Defense, among others. She is currently a permanent member for the NIH Therapeutic Approaches to Genetic Diseases (TAG) Study Section and for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). She is also serving in the Musculo-Skeletal Gene & Cell Therapy Committee for the ASGCT, and as an editorial member of several journals. She has trained more than 30 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and medical students in her laboratory.

Recent publications from her lab include:

Research projects available within the Perlingeiro Laboratory include the following:

  • Transcriptional mechanisms and signaling pathways controlling mesodermal cell fate

  • Strategies to enable translational application of iPS cells to treat muscular dystrophies

  • Genetic correction of disease- and patient-specific iPS cells

  • Dissecting the mechanisms associated with stem cell self-renewal and long-term engraftment