Stem Cells Journal Club

Join us for engaging, relatable, and memorable discussions about scientific findings.

What is the Stem Cells Journal Club?

The Stem Cells Journal Club is a way to get the ‘inside scoop’ on the development of some inspirational hematology papers.

It’s an opportunity for you to take part in friendly and informal online sessions where invited speakers will share:

• Insights into their successes and failures
• Relatable, memorable, and funny anecdotes about conducting their research
• Stories about other impactful moments

Next events

Inhibiting ferroptosis enhances ex vivo expansion of human haematopoietic stem cells

Date: May 6, 2026, at 15:00 CET

Presenter: Dr. Lucrezia della Volpe, Post-Doctoral fellow, Boston Children’s Hospital, United States

Lab: Vijay G. Sankaran

Hosts: Konstantinos Kokkaliaris and Simona Valletta (SWG on Stem Cells)

What will be discussed:

Improved ex vivo expansion of human haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) would considerably advance transplantation and genome-engineered therapies, yet existing culture methods still allow substantial HSC loss. Here we show that this attrition is driven largely by ferroptosis, a metabolically regulated, iron-dependent cell-death pathway, and that it can be blocked to augment HSC expansion. Inhibiting ferroptosis with liproxstatin-1 or ferrostatin-1 markedly increases the expansion of cord blood and adult HSCs consistently across donors in both widely used serum-free cultures and recently reported chemically defined conditions. The expanded cells retain phenotypic and molecular stem cell identity and mediate improved durable, multilineage engraftment in xenotransplanted mice without genotoxicity or aberrant haematopoiesis. Mechanistically, ferroptosis blockade is accompanied by upregulated ribosome biogenesis and cholesterol synthesis, increasing levels of 7-dehydrocholesterol—a potent endogenous ferroptosis inhibitor that itself promotes HSC expansion. Crucially, this approach enhances yields of therapeutically genome-modified HSCs, paving a path for clinical applications.

The article: Inhibiting ferroptosis enhances ex vivo expansion of human haematopoietic stem cells

How to register

Zoom Webinars

To register for this webinar free of charge via Zoom Webinars, please fill out the registration form.

EHA Online Platform

If you have not yet registered for our online community platform

To take part in a club event, you’ll need to register for EHA’s new community platform. This platform, which is currently being developed, will enable EHA members around the world to connect, communicate, and collaborate in new ways. We’ll start promoting it to our full community in the near future.

When your register, please state in the ‘Motivation’ section that you would like to join the Stem Cells Journal Club. After you’ve registered on the platform, you’ll also have to follow the steps below.

If you’ve already registered for our online community platform

You can register for events by visiting the Stem Cells Journal Club section on the EHA community platform.

To take part in a specific event:

• Select the event’s title
• Select the ‘Register’ button

You can also join the forum by selecting ‘Become a member’ on any page within the section.

If you have problems or questions

If you experience issues whilst registering for MyEHA or have questions about the club, please email swgs@ehaweb.org.