Agustin Luz Madrigal, PhD
Position title: Research Scientist
Email: luzmadrigal@wisc.edu
Website: Website
- Organ System/Disease Focus
- Visual, retina, Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), X-linked congenital stationary night blindness (XCSNB), reprogramming and regeneration.
- Aligned Research Focus
- Tissue engineering, scaffolds, retina differentiation, endoderm and mesoderm differentiation, cell reprogramming
Research Description:
Luz Madrigal is a research scientist in Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Professor Mrinalini Hoon’s lab. Previously, he was a research associate at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, working with stem cells and organoids.
His expertise is in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), which he has used to study mesoderm and endoderm development. Collaborating with researchers at RIKEN, Japan, he helped develop a method to turn hPSCs into tracheal cells (Nat Commun. 2020).
Later, in Dr. David Gamm’s lab, Dr. Luz Madrigal used hPSCs and retinal organoids to study eye diseases and cell therapies. He led a project on Congenital Stationary Night Blindness (CSNB2) and contributed to photoreceptor replacement studies in primates and canine models. He also worked on the ORRCA project, engineering stem cell-derived retinal cells for implantation (Bioact Mater. 2023). His long-term goal is to understand organ development and regeneration, especially in the retina, to advance cell-based therapies.
Selected References:
Micromolded honeycomb design to support the generation of a bilayered RPE and photoreceptor cell construct. Lee IK1, Xie R1, Luz-Madrigal A1, Min S, Zhu J, Jin J, Edwards KL, Phillips MJ, Ludwig AL, Gamm DM, Gong S, Ma Z. Bioact Mater. 2023 Jul 31;30:142-153. 1Equal contributions.
Kishimoto K, Furukawa KT, Luz-Madrigal A, Yamaoka A, Matsuoka C, Habu M, Alev C, Zorn AM, Morimoto M. Bidirectional Wnt signaling between endoderm and mesoderm confers tracheal identity in mouse and human cells. Nat Commun. 2020 Aug 27;11(1):4159