David L. Mack PhD

Rehabilitation Medicine
Associate Professor

Email: dmack21@uw.edu | Phone: 206.616.8204

The Mack laboratory combines stem cell and gene therapies to develop new treatments for neuromuscular diseases. Induced pluripotent stem cell technology is used to generate patient-specific stem cells that can undergo directed-differentiation to multiple lineages in culture. Three-dimensional scaffolds are also being employed to further differentiate each cell type into their more mature form. This so called “disease-in-a-dish” approach will enable us to study disease mechanisms, and to create novel drug discovery platforms. Drugs identified in this way are likely to work in the patient since the patient’s own cells were used as the screening tool. Diseases being explored include Duchenne muscular dystrophy, X-linked myotubular myopathy and autistic syndrome disorder. Dr. Mack is a classically trained geneticist with expertise in developmental and stem cell biology. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute, he studied how the stem cell microenvironment controls cell fate during mammary gland development. His recent contributions to the field of regenerative medicine center on the interplay between a cell’s genetic program and it microenvironment during lineage commitment.