Alexander Gregorieff
PhD
Dr. Gregorieff joined the Department of Pathology at McGill University as an Assistant Professor in 2017. His current research interests stem from his doctoral thesis in the lab of Dr. Hans Clevers in the Netherlands. During this time, he studied the Wnt/Tcf pathway and its role in driving intestinal development and homeostasis. He became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Jeff Wrana at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Toronto. The focus of his post-doctoral training was the role of the Hippo signaling effector, Yap, in intestinal stem cells during regeneration and cancer initiation. In his academic career, Dr. Gregorieff has been the research director of several graduate students. He has published 28 original articles and presented his work at numerous international conferences. Dr. Gregorieff's future research goals will be to study the role of the Hippo pathway in stromal cells during gut homeostasis and tumorigenesis. Secondly, he is also interested in dissecting the signals underlying cellular plasticity of adult stem cells. To achieve these goals, he is currently developing a broad range of genetic tools including Cre-lox based mice for Research Interests. He is recently award by CIHR for his project “Role of Hippo signaling in myofibroblasts during gut regeneration and tumorigenesis.”
One of the extraordinary abilities of all living creatures is their capacity to repair damaged tissues following injury. This regenerative property is in large part due to the existence of stem cells that are defined by their ability to replace themselves through division, as well as giving rise to specialized cell types through a process known as differentiation. Unfortunately, once stem cells acquire mutations that cause them to proliferate incessantly, they can also fuel cancer growth. My lab focuses on the stem cells in the epithelial lining of our intestinal tract. By constantly replenishing the gut epithelium, intestinal stem cells ensure proper nutrient uptake and barrier formation against environmental toxins and pathogens throughout life. My interests lie in understanding the signals that control gut stem cell behaviour and how these signals become misregulated in diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer.