Research Vision:

Better understanding mechanisms that will ameliorate the untoward effects of ischemia, reperfusion, preservation, isolation, or transformation from iPSC will allow for realistic expectations for cell therapy.

Research Areas:

• Conditions that affect in vitro cells (differentiated hepatocytes and iPSC hepatocyte-like cells) to act like normal liver (Partner with V Kirchner)

• Policy and ethics: ethical and policy implications of advanced biopreservation (NSF, Bischof and Toner), use of clustering methodology to improve liver waitlist/transplant outcomes (Prunelli, Nursing) and machine learning to predict kidney function from older deceased organ donors (Gupta, (U Texas) and UNOS research)

• VCA: transplants: technical and administrative challenges for uterine and abdominal wall transplants.

Research Publications:

1. Kirchner VA, Tak E, Kim K, LeCluyse EL, Niedernhofer LJ, Soldatow V, Lee J, Kim J, Tolar J, Song GW, Pruett TL. The evolving microenvironment of the human hepatocyte: Healthy vs. cirrhotic liver vs. isolated cells. Tissue Cell. 2020 Feb;62:101310. doi: 10.1016/j.tice.2019.101310. Epub 2019 Oct 21. PMID: 32433018.

2. Kirchner VA, Twaroski K, Wysoglad K, Algoo J, LeCluyse EL, Song GW, Tak E, Chen W, Lee SG, Pruett TL, Tolar J. Reprogramming of human hepatic non-parenchymal cells: Step-by-step protocol. Current Protocols in Stem Cell Biology. 2020;53(1). doi: 10.1002/cpsc.112

3. Pruinelli L, Simon GJ, Monsen KA, Pruett T, Gross CR, Radosevich DM, Westra BL. A Holistic Clustering Methodology for Liver Transplantation Survival. Nurs Res. 2018 Jul/Aug;67(4):331-340. doi: 10.1097/NNR.0000000000000289. PMID: 29877986; PMCID: PMC6023761.

4. Pruinelli L, Stai B, Ma S, Pruett TL, Simon GJ. A Likelihood-based Convolution Approach to Estimate Event Occurrences in Large Longitudinal Incomplete Clinical Data. IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI). 2019:1-8, doi:10.1109/ICHI.2019.8904622.

5. Pruett TL, Vece GR, Carrico RJ, Klassen DK. US deceased kidney transplantation: Estimated GFR, donor age and KDPI association with graft survival. EClinicalMedicine. 2021 Jun 23;37:100980. doi: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100980. PMID: 34386752; PMCID: PMC8343266.