Biotechnology at CCSF - Unurzul Jigmeddagva

Unurzul (zula) Jigmeddagva

While in Mongolia, Zula completed a medical degree before becoming involved in research on childhood disabilities. As a researcher, she worked for several years at a national rehabilitation center where she helped establish an early detection and intervention program for children with disabilities.

“After coming to the US in 2016, I started taking classes at CCSF to prepare for a research career. Though I had medical training under my belt, I had minimal experience working in a research laboratory setting and I wondered whether I would be able to pick up the necessary technical skills for such work. Thankfully, I gained confidence in my laboratory skills through coursework at CCSF.“

Zula completed CCSF's Stem Cell Technology Certificate with a 9-month CIRM intership at USCF in the Robinson Lab. Her work there involved using stem cell technology to study the toxicity of different environment agents. She believes that the findings from this research could eventually help promote important policy changes to prevent neurodevelopmental diseases that lead to disabilities.

Zula will be starting a master’s degree in Public Health with a focus on epidemiology and biostatistics at University of Southern California in the fall (2020). After the completion of her graduate program, she hopes to continue her research in toxicology, assessing the health effect of different chemicals in our environment.

Unurzul_jigmeddagva_CCSF_CIRM_Stem_Cell_Internship_Neurotoxicant_Neurogenesis.pptx

Unurzul_jigmeddagva_CIRM_poster_final.pdf

Stem Cell Internship: Robinson Lab, UCSF

Project Title: Utilizing a Human Embryonic Stem Cell Model of Neurogenesis to Identify Developmental Neurotoxicants

Project Abstract: Due to the number of chemicals with unknown health effects and the cost of traditional in vivo toxicological assessments, strategies utilizing in vitro- and in silico-based models are emerging for chemical hazard identification and risk assessment. Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can be differentiated into all cell types of the developing CNS, and have been proposed as models for developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) screening. Previous studies demonstrated the application of hESC model for testing the effects of specific environmental chemicals on human neurodevelopment. In this study, we expanded the application of our model to screen for DNT using a chemical library consisting of unknown and suspected toxicants relevant for human exposure. In our initial screen, we assessed the ability of compounds to induce cytotoxicity at 24h post-exposure in hESC-derived neural progenitor cells (NPCs), using viability and cell death assays. Approximately 50% of the testing compounds were identified to be cytotoxic based on one of the two assays (p<0.05, ANOVA). The majority of these cytotoxic compounds (90%) altered cell viability in contrast to causing cell death (56%). We will compare potency with publicly available data (ToxCast and DNT-DIver) and with other developmental and reproduction toxicity models (e.g., yeast, C. elegans, and human primary cytotrophoblasts) to determine common and model-specific toxic effects.

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