Michael Hicks

Dr. Michael Hicks is an Assistant Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at UC Irvine and associate director of the UCI Muscle Biology and Disease Research Center. His research uses emerging technologies to address fundamental questions in skeletal muscle biology including how muscle stem cells interact with myofibers to build niches in vivo, and how diseased microenvironments influence stem cell self-renewal. He currently holds grants through the NIH National Institute of Aging, and fellowships through an NIH K award program and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Dr. Hicks completed his postdoctoral research in 2020 with Dr. April Pyle at UCLA studying how developmental pathways improve the differentiation of skeletal muscle from human pluripotent stem cells, and he completed his PhD from the University of Arizona in 2014 with Dr. Paul Standley investigating the how connective tissue fibroblasts regulate skeletal muscle repair.

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Making and Breaking the Skeletal Muscle Stem Cell Niche

An effective cell therapy for skeletal muscle must create new myofibers as well as maintain the muscle stem cell pool. Yet so far retention of muscle stem cells after transplantation using skeletal muscle derived from human pluripotent stem cells has proven challenging. Dr. Hicks will focus on his lab’s efforts with the Nanostring GeoMX spatial RNA sequencing platform to identify key factors driving human niche formation between myofibers and skeletal muscle stem cells following transplantation in mice. Dr. Hicks will demonstrate how spatial RNA sequencing data can be combined with inducible CRISPR/Cas9 systems to ablate or overexpress key niche genes to significantly improve muscle cell transplantation. Determining how transplanted skeletal muscle stem cells take up position in their niches will be a major step towards improving long-term cell therapies for skeletal muscle diseases.

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