Derek van der Kooy is a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Toronto. Van der Kooy received a master’s degree in psychology at the University of British Columbia. He received a Ph.D. in anatomy from Erasmus University in 1978, and from the Department of Anatomy at the University of Toronto in 1980. Van der Kooy did postdoctoral research work at Cambridge University and at the Salk Institute in California.
He became an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Toronto in 1981. In 1986, he became an associate professor. He served there as a professor from 1991 until 2002. In 2002, Derek van der Kooy became a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology. He has cross-appointments to both the Departments of Medical Biophysics and the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto.
Derek van der Kooy’s lab is located in the Ter-rence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomo-lecular Research. Van der Kooy and his associates carry out various neuroscience and developmental biology research projects.
Van der Kooy’s 1994 paper on neural stem cells in the adult mammalian forebrain was published in the journal Neuron. This work first established that adult mammalian neural stem cells were located in the subependyma of the forebrain lateral ventricle, where two types of lineage-related precursor cells, progenitor cells and stem cells, were shown to be present. The proliferation of these cell types was characterized in further experiments that were reported in articles in Development and the Journal of Neuroscience. Derek van der Kooy’s lab produced the first report of stem cells in the adult mammalian eye, published in 2000 in Science. Their additional work documented how embryonic stem cells were shown to differentiate directly to neural stem cells through a default mechanism and was published in Neuron in 2001.
Derek van der Kooy’s lab continues to investigate the nature of stem cells, embryonic and adult, the concept of immortal cells, and the differentiation of embryonic stem cells, which are capable of forming any tissue in the body, to neural stem cells. This lab research is focused on neurobiology, but is separated into three distinct areas: neural development and stem cell biology, neurobiology of motivation, and learning and memory genes. The neural development and stem cell biology project involves the development of the mammalian brain, eye, and pancreas. Neural stem cells also are present throughout the lifetime of an animal, and are being locally characterized. Van der Kooy’s lab has also discovered the surprising capacity of the adult mammalian eye to regenerate. Other experiments involve cul-turing mouse retinal stem cells from normal and genetically modified mice in order to understand the factors that control retinal stem cell activity. Finally, the researchers in the lab have isolated a rare cell from the adult mouse pancreas that can show extensive proliferation under defined conditions in vitro. These cells may comprise a population of adult mammalian pancreatic stem cells, which might in the future be employed in treating type 1 diabetics.
