Vittorio Sebastiano

Vittorio Sebastiano, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Division of Reproductive Biology; Director, Transgenic, Knockout and Tumor Model Center, Stanford Cancer Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine

Research Description: Dr. Sebastiano’s research group is focused on understanding human reprogramming with the goal to use patient specific pluripotent stem cells to dissect the principles development, and to model and treat genetic and degenerative diseases by establishing clinically relevant stem cell-based platforms. He has contributed to examples of gene therapy using specific genome modification of induced pluripotent stem cells derived from patients affected by genetic diseases and implemented GMP-compatible platforms for the generation of clinically relevant cell products. His research interests also focus on developing different tools, models and assays to investigate human embryonic development. For example, he has discovered novel members of a class of human-specific long non-coding RNAs derived from retroviral sequences and shown that they are essential for the achievement of pluripotency both in vivo and in vitro. He also developed the first in silico map of blastocyst maturation that allowed for the identification of novel factors that are instrumental to the formation of a pluripotent epiblast in the human blastocysts. He has also contributed to understanding mouse gametogenesis and epigenetics regulating early embryonic development, including pre-implantation and post-implantation development with embryos obtained by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, a technique that he helped pioneer. Dr. Sebastiano directs the Human Pluripotent Stem Cells Core Facility in the Stanford Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cells Research, a facility used by multiple members of SDRC. He also directs the Transgenic, Knockout and Tumor Model Center, the central Stanford transgenic mouse core facility. While affiliated with the Cancer Institute, this core is used by many Stanford investigators not in the Cancer Institute, including SDRC members. He has also collaborated with members of SDRC to optimize CRISPR/Cas9-based methods to generate Cre recombinase-sensitive alleles of specific genes in mice.

Selected relevant publications (Stanford DRC Members in BOLD):

  1. Sarkar TJ, Quarta M, Mukherjee S, Colville A, Paine P, Doan L, Tran CM, Chu CR, Horvath S, Qi LS, Bhutani N, Rando TA, Sebastiano V. Transient non-integrative expression of nuclear reprogramming factors promotes multifaceted amelioration of aging in human cells. Nat Commun. 2020 Mar 24;11(1):1545. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-15174-3. PMID: 32210226; PMCID: PMC7093390. 

  2. Martin RM, Ikeda K, Cromer MK, Uchida N, Nishimura T, Romano R, Tong AJ, Lemgart VT, Camarena J, Pavel-Dinu M, Sindhu C, Wiebking V, Vaidyanathan S, Dever DP, Bak RO, Laustsen A, Lesch BJ, Jakobsen MR, Sebastiano V, Nakauchi H, Porteus MH. Highly Efficient and Marker-free Genome Editing of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells by CRISPR-Cas9 RNP and AAV6 Donor-Mediated Homologous Recombination. Cell Stem Cell. 2019 May 2;24(5):821-828.e5. doi: 10.1016/j.stem.2019.04.001. PMID: 31051134. 

  3. Vilarino M, Rashid ST, Suchy FP, McNabb BR, van der Meulen T, Fine EJ, Ahsan SD, Mursaliyev N, Sebastiano V, Diab SS, Huising MO, Nakauchi H, Ross PJ. CRISPR/Cas9 microinjection in oocytes disables pancreas development in sheep. Sci Rep. 2017 Dec 12;7(1):17472. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-17805-0. PMID: 29234093; PMCID: PMC5727233.