Our Research

Welcome to the Hadland lab. Our lab’s focus is in understanding the developmental ontogeny of the blood and immune systems in both normal and diseased states.  We are particularly interested in determining the mechanisms by which hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) arise and how they acquire their unique properties, such as the capacity for life-long self-renewal and multilineage hematopoietic reconstitution following transplantation. We are also interested in understanding the embryonic origins of pediatric leukemias and how signals that regulate HSC development are co-opted by pre-leukemic stem cells. We aim to discover methods to recapitulate HSC development ex vivo for the purposes of disease modelling and engineering cellular therapies for blood and immune disorders, and to devise novel strategies for the early detection and prevention of childhood leukemias.