Graduate Student Noélle Ammon opens up an incubator and points to the rows of small round containers.

“Those are all human stem cells,” she said.

Ammon is working with Professor Laura Grabel on an ongoing, four-year, research project for the biology department. Grabel, who has been on the faculty for 25 years, and her team of undergraduate and graduate students focus on using mouse and human embryonic stem cells to make neurons to insert into the brains of mice experiencing epilepsy.

Grabel testified in front of the Connecticut House of Representatives on Tuesday in support of continuing state funding for stem cell research. While federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is currently restricted to the cell lines generated before August 2001, Connecticut pledged $100 million to more broadly support embryonic stem cell research over ten years. It is now the third year of the program and state legislators received a progress report from Grabel and others about how the money is being used.

“There has been enormous progress made in stem cell research,” Grabel said, attributing such improvements in part to the recent funds that several states have dedicated to research.

Watch a video of Grabel in her lab

Just last month, the University of Connecticut Health Center announced the isolation of the state’s first human stem cell line.

Grabel is involved in stem cell research at the University and throughout the state. She believes that Connecticut is an ideal location for this project.

“The benefit of a small state like Connecticut is that we can all periodically get together and talk about stem cells,” Grabel said. “It’s such a blue state that there is remarkably little opposition to stem cell research.”

Grabel, in collaboration with Professors of Biology Jan Naegele and Gloster Aaron, focuses her research on working to replace dying brain cells of epileptic mice with cells derived from embryonic stem cells.

Grabel is working towards a cure for severe cases of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. This type of epilepsy is most often caused by traumatic brain injury or severe prolonged seizures in adulthood.

“The hope is that we could eventually inhibit seizures,” Grabel said. “[This information] is generally applicable to looking at lots of diseases throughout the nervous system.”

The early studies of stem cells looked at trying to understand what promotes the integration of transplanted cells into the site of transplantation. Researchers focused on understanding the conditions within a host brain that give the cells directions on how to migrate to the correct place of damage and then how to become the correct type of neural cells.

“You want to avoid tumor formation and make sure that your cells can integrate and function,” Grabel said.

Another recent discovery threatens to completely transform how people think of stem cells.

“If I take one of your skin cells and I give it just three genes and turn those genes on, that cell will become for most purposes, like an embryonic stem cell,” Grabel said. “That’s revolutionized our thinking about what a stem cell is.”

Therapeutically, this would allow scientists to take skin cells from patients sick with diseases like Alzheimer’s and change those cells into genetically compatible stem cells with which to replace the neurons.

“If it were genetically identical to you there would not be a problem of rejection,” Grabel said.

Grabel’s research deals with embryonic cells, but she is curious to see if her results can be replicated using the new techniques.

While research was underway before the State of Connecticut started supporting it, the recent state funding has helped the project succeed.

“We have a lot more security and a lot more freedom to do certain things that other states may not be able to do,” Ammon said. “Federal money would allow us to tackle a lot more projects and mean that we could collaborate with more people.”

With the recent swearing in of President Barack Obama, people are beginning to wonder whether the restrictions placed by the Bush administration on federal funding for stem cell research will be lifted.

“Federal funding for our stem cell research project is our next goal,” said Professor Naegle. “[Our] work is just beginning, but it will give us a good handle on whether the stem cell therapy is actually a ‘cure’.”

The future of stem cell research looks bright. Recently, the FDA approved the first clinical trial for a human embryonic stem cell-based therapy to treat spinal cord injury. Although the project remains small, with just eight to ten participants, it is the first type of research of its kind.